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Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

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
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
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
– Stephen Jay Gould
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
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
– Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
– Stephen Jay Gould
The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science-or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
– Stephen Jay Gould
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
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
– 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
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
– Stephen Jay Gould
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
We pass through this world but once.
– Stephen Jay Gould
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
– Stephen Jay Gould
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
With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.
– Stephen Jay Gould
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.
– Stephen Jay Gould
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
If I don't make it, I'll be very sad that there are things I didn't do, but I'm happy that I've done what I have.
– Stephen Jay Gould
I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.
– Stephen Jay Gould
I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.
– Stephen Jay Gould
Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious.
– Stephen Jay Gould
Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.
– Stephen Jay Gould