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
Topics: Criticism, Evolution
Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don’t struggle to get them right.
—Stephen Jay Gould
Topics: God
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
Topics: Scientists, Science
Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one’s provisional consent.
—Stephen Jay Gould
Topics: Science
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s rain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and ied in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould
Topics: Justice
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question.
—Stephen Jay Gould
Topics: Storytelling
The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
—Stephen Jay Gould
Topics: Kindness
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
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
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
Topics: Civilization
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- E. O. Wilson American Sociobiologist
- Jonas Salk American Virologist
- Thomas Henry Huxley English Biologist
- J. B. S. Haldane British Biologist
- Carl Sagan American Astronomer
- Sidney Hook American Social Philosopher
- Duke Ellington American Musician
- Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
- Milton Friedman American Economist
- Murray Gell-Mann American Physicist
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