Stephen Jay Gould > Quotes

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“We pass through this world but once. 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, The Mismeasure of Man

“We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

“The most important tactic in an argument next to being right is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

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

“Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“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”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and seeatshops”
― Stephen J. Gould

“Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas

“I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity. ”
― Stephen Jay Gould (Dinosaur in a Haystack)

“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

“The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History

“Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

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― Stephen Jay Gould

“Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History

“The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History

“My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History