E.O. Wilson

The search for consilience is the foundation of the natural sciences. It is now spreading rapidly into the social sciences, and I believe it is the key to the unification of all knowledge.

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50 million years.

Without the free exploration of the humanities and the creative arts, we risk becoming a society of technical barbarians.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

The biological frontier is the most exciting in all of science.

The true cause of our environmental troubles is the conflict between short-term and long-term values.

People would rather believe than know.

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper.

The evolutionary story is the story of how we got here, and it is the only story we have that can give us a sense of who we are.

We are not afraid of predators, we are transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters.

The central task of the social sciences is to explain why people behave the way they do.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

The key to understanding humanity is in our genes, and the key to understanding our genes is in our evolutionary history.

The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development.

The human condition is an endless struggle for meaning.

Science is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles.

The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to heal the Earth and ourselves.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

The brain is a product of evolution, and so is the mind.

The arts are not a mere luxury, a dalliance for the affluent. They are a vital part of the human experience.