Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions. – E. O. Wilson
Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest. – E. O. Wilson
The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago. – E. O. Wilson
An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being’s, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat. – E. O. Wilson
Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input. – E. O. Wilson
I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves. – E. 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. – E. O. Wilson
I’ve found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they’re communicating but it tells you a great deal – by dialect and tone, content and circumstance – about the quality of the character. – E. O. Wilson
It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships. – E. O. Wilson
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. – E. O. Wilson
There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs. – E. O. Wilson
The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it’s Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity. – E. O. Wilson
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction. – E. O. Wilson
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. – E. O. Wilson
If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable. – E. O. Wilson
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive. – E. O. Wilson
Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false. – E. O. Wilson
We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories. – E. O. Wilson
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time. – E. O. Wilson
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? – E. O. Wilson
