I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

If we lose half the species, which could happen by the end of the century if we don't do anything, that's going to create a big difference down the line in the stability and even the economic potential in the living world. Irreversibly.

Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.

[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].

Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.

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