Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

The world is full of signals that we don't perceive.

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.

Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.