E. O. Wilson Quotations

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.

Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.

I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society. If one colony member devotes its life to service over marriage, the individual is of benefit to the society, even though it does not have personal offspring. A soldier going into battle will benefit his country, but he runs a higher risk of death than one who does not. An altruist benefits the group, but a layabout or coward who saves his own energy and reduces his bodily risk passes the resulting social cost to others.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.

Because the living environment is what really sustains us.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.

'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.

I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

My baby could be killed down there. If they don't get her some food, she could starve.

Personally, I've always thought dying on vacation was the better way to go . . . I do have certain requests about my passing, though. I hope that if I die in a plane crash, it's coming FROM a vacation instead of heading TO. I know, it's a small consolation, but I'd have a tan and would look rested at my calling hours.

One of the floods we had washed the bridge out. It can be almost dry as a bone or it can be impossible to cross.

On the court, she brings leadership. She keeps them together. She talks to them and makes sure they know what they're doing. She's like a coach on the floor for me when they can't hear what I'm saying.

I was so full of nerves over the last three stages,

I was so full of nerves over the last three stages, ... I heard everything and I felt everything, but the car was absolutely fine. I was really quite hopeful this morning. Mark only took 8 seconds out of me on this first one this morning and I thought, 'that's only half a second a mile, I can live with that' and then he only took half a second out of me on the next one. But when he spun on the third one that really allowed me to relax a bit.

nobody cares, if you break some more windows nobody's going to do anything about it in short, anything goes.

Nobody on the committee could even define what it means. So how can an employer?