The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'

We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears.

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