Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of 'punctuated equilibria' than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only 'rarely' (i.e. rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

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

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