E. O. Wilson Quotes

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"There is no better high than discovery."

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

"Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

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

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

"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."

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