quotes by Edward O. Wilson

"One planet, one experiment."
— Edward 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."
— Edward O. Wilson

"Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture."
— Edward O. Wilson (The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth)

"People would rather believe than know."
— Edward O. Wilson

"We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors."
— Edward O. Wilson (The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth)

""Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.""
— Edward O. Wilson (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge)

""I believe that in the process of locating new avenues of creative thought, we will also arrive at an existential conservatism. It is worth asking repeatedly: Where are our deepest roots? We are, it seems, Old World, catarrhine primates, brilliant emergent animals, defined genetically by our unique origins, blessed by our newfound biological genius, and secure in our homeland if we wish to make it so. What does it all mean? This is what it all means. To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep out selves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time. And it we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing.""
— Edward O. Wilson (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge)

"Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings."
— Edward O. Wilson

"Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do."
— Edward O. Wilson (The Future of Life)

" “In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.”"
— Edward O. Wilson