The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life.

A lecture is much more of a dialogue than many of you probably realize.

The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them.

Death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.

Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance.

I think I know what is bothering the students. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.

I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.