Stephen Jay Gould

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.

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

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

There is an air of unreality in debating these arcane points when the world is changing in such dramatic ways right in front of our eyes because of global warming.

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry - except that he wasn't as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.

By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors.