We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
E. O. Wilson
You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
The education of women is the best way to save the environment.
The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
There is no better high than discovery.
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.
Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.
Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.
In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.
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.
It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?
When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.
For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.
Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.
The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.
