A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

It is the things we think we know - because they are so elementary or because they surround us - that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.

The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.

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

The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.

... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.