E. O. Wilson

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.

— E. O. Wilson

Wonderful theory, wrong species.

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.

— E. O. Wilson

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

— E. O. Wilson

Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.

— E. O. Wilson

Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

— E. O. Wilson

[O]ld beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.

— E. O. Wilson

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

— E. O. Wilson

Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.

— E. O. Wilson

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

— E. O. Wilson

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

— E. O. Wilson

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

— E. O. Wilson

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

— E. O. Wilson

I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the…

— E. O. Wilson

Look closely at nature. Every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived. Who are…

— E. O. Wilson

I think we will make it. Because one quality people have - certainly Americans have it - is that they can adapt…

— 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…

— E. O. Wilson

Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look…

— E. O. Wilson

Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of…

— 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…

— E. O. Wilson

In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will…

— E. O. Wilson

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified. Today the greatest divide within humanity…

— E. O. Wilson

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that…

— E. O. Wilson

Today [the voice of women] is being heard loud and clear. But I do not read the welcome triumph of feminism, social,…

— E. O. Wilson

[T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy…

— E. O. Wilson

The students of biodiversity, the ones we most need in science today, have an enormous task ahead of molecular biology and the…

— E. O. Wilson

Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong.…

— E. O. Wilson

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind.…

— E. O. Wilson

Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not…

— E. O. Wilson

We have to create a sustainable environment, worldwide, and we're not doing it. The best thing we can do with the rest…

— E. O. Wilson

Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish…

— E. O. Wilson

While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we…

— 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

Every ecosystem, even a small one, is sustainable because it has certain ensembles and conditions and influences that are unique to it.…

— E. O. Wilson

Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule…

— E. O. Wilson

Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and…

— E. O. Wilson

Because the living environment is what really sustains us.

— E. O. Wilson