E. O. Wilson

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

“Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.”

“In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.”

“It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.”

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

“There is no better high than discovery.”

“People respect nonfiction but they read novels.”

“For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.”