A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.

Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.