We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.

Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. ... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun

For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.