It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive.

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.