"Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted."
— Steven Wright

"Today I married myself and I became my own wife."
— Johnette Napolitano, Concrete Blonde

"The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)"
— Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

"'The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.'"
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower....beautiful in essence."
— Tony Samara

"If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into fol shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees;ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets:they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home."
— Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."
— H.L. Mencken

"With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you - that's my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you."
— Osho

"One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth. You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don't leave any footprints. You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind."
— Osho

"No wonder these people don’t believe in evolution. It obviously hasn’t worked in their favor."
— Jeri Smith-Ready (Requiem for the Devil)

"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity"
— Tony Samara

"A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric...."
— Thomas Henry Huxley

"Innovation is an evolutionary process, so it's not necessary to be radical all the time."
— Marc Jacobs

"What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

""The geologic cycle is a bunch of balarky.""
— Arthur C. Howard

"The geologic column is a bunch of balarky."
— Arthur C. Howard

"Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth."
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)

"Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts."
— Ian Fleming (Casino Royale)

"The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.'"
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones."
— Robert Wright (The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology)

"The geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of the fishes..."
— R.J. Norman, evolutionist

"Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind."
— Charles Darwin (The Origin of Species)

"...but I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation."
— E.J.H. Corner

"The best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is the imagination."
— Homer W. Smith, evolutionist

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . .
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
— Charles Darwin

"A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans."
— David Rains Wallace (Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays)

"Every time we exterminate a predator, we are in a sense creating a new predator."
— David Rains Wallace (Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays)

"But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2010: Odyssey Two)

"Darwinism is dynamic. It is about change, not stasis; about process, not pattern; about tales, not tableaux; about becoming, not being."
— Henry Gee (In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life)

"...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts."
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

"There is only one story. It is the story of an evolving cosmos awakening to itself and becoming conscious. Who could argue with that? It happened. And it is happyning. First there was matter. Then one fine day, life. Then just a short while back, self-consciousness. And most recently, the recognition of, and identification with, Spirit."
— Gaghdad Bob

""Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain."
— Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)

"...the student of prehistoric man...cannot reject [the Castenedolo skull] as false without doing injury to his sense of truth, and he cannot accept it as fact without shattering his accepted beliefs."
— Sir Arthur Keith, evolutionist

"We do not know how life began."
— Tracy I. Storer, evolutionist

"As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present."
— C. A. Arnold, evolutionist

"Love, I have always known, is an evolutionary trait. It is a delicately tuned, intricate, sensitive impulse, but a trait nevertheless, a reaction honed by millions of years of an ever-changing and complex mating instinct."
— David Bajo