Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.