Stephen Jay Gould Quotes
"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."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Time, Science, Possibility, Apples, Merit, Physics, Tomorrow)
"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."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Accidents, Complexity, Principles, Results, Understanding)
"When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: People, Judgment, Manipulation, Tools)
"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Question)
"The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Evolution, Lies, Proof)
"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Science, Culture, Tradition)
"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Innovation, Nothing, Novelty)
"Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Superiority, Survival)
"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."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Life, Opportunity, Hope, Denial, Lying)
"We pass through this world but once."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: World)
"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Evolution, Nonsense)
"The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Needs)