Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.

Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do.

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there.

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

The commitment must be much deeper - to let no species knowingly die; to take all reasonable action to protect every species and race in perpetuity.

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