You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.

A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good [...] rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.

The interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.

Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.