Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.

Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.

My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.