The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.

There are 400,000 species of beetles on this planet, but only 8,000 species of mammals.

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.

It wasn't until I had performed by first autopsy that I realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them in my imagination.