Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
E. O. Wilson
We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
E. O. Wilson
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?
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
E. O. Wilson
Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
E. O. Wilson
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
E. O. Wilson
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
E. O. Wilson
Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.
E. O. Wilson
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
E. O. Wilson
There is no better high than discovery.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
E. O. Wilson
Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
E. O. Wilson
Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
The education of women is the best way to save the environment.
E. O. Wilson
People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
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?
E. O. Wilson
The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth’s ancient biosphere.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
E. O. Wilson
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.
E. O. Wilson
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
E. O. Wilson
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
E. O. Wilson
It’s like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
E. O. Wilson
Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
E. O. Wilson