« All History Quotes · Stephen Jay Gould's Page
History Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
- Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant…
- Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained…
- Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve…
- Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
- Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps…
- The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.
- All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an…
- Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we…
- Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater…
- Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the…
- The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.
- What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
- 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 prickly…
- At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.
- People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary…
- We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering,…
- History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.
- Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history…
- Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one…
- Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a home-grown phenomenon of American sociocultural history-a splinter movement ... who…
- History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
- The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human…
- No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
More History Quotes
- No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt
- It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded… — Hannah Arendt
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song. — Louis Armstrong
- This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. — Neil Armstrong
- All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in… — Neil Armstrong
- In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic. — Julian Assange
- We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents… — Julian Assange
- Natural history is not about producing fables. — David Attenborough
- Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that… — David Attenborough
- In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes,… — David Attenborough