[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.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

I want us to save the creation-not just care about it, but to save it.

So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we've been around for only one million years--too soon be sure.

Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.

I think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.