Stephen Jay Gould

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned and regrafted.

I am, in fact, a card-carrying atheist, but I do not proselytize.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of cold, hard facts. It is a tribute to the wondrous diversity of life.

The human race has always had a profound fear of monsters.

Books are the carriers of civilization.

Evolution is a theory in crisis, but not in the way creationists think.

I have become convinced that the best way to teach science is through stories.

The stereotype of the scientist as a dry, humorless pedant is a cruel libel.

When a great general dies, the army suffers.

Contingency is a thing unto itself.

IQ tests are biased against the poor and minorities.

Baseball is a 19th-century pastoral game, played on the village green by people in mutton-chop whiskers.

The essence of humanity is our capacity for wonder.

Paleontology is the detective story of biology.

We must not confuse adaptation with progress.

The history of life is not a tree, but a bush.

Science is magnificently vulgar.

I love the old, but I am not a reactionary.

The greatest tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Human equality is a contingent fact, not an ethical principle.