But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. Voyager did wonders for our knowledge, but performed just… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I despair of persuading people to drop the familiar and comforting tactic of dichotomy. Perhaps, instead, we might expand the framework of… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it:… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
... many folks take them seriously because they just 'know' that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact,… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ... — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower"… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner. — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably)… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts… — Stephen Jay Gould Copy Share Image
