Stephen Jay Gould Quotes & Sayings

“Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.”

“When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.”

“In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”

“Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.”

“What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.”

“Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”

“Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.”

“We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.”

“We pass through this world but once.”

“The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.”