The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.

You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.

I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.