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.
E. O. Wilson

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
E. O. Wilson

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
E. O. Wilson

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
E. O. Wilson

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
E. O. Wilson

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
E. O. Wilson

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.
E. O. Wilson

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
E. O. Wilson

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.
E. O. Wilson

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
E. O. Wilson


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.
E. O. Wilson

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
E. O. Wilson

Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
E. O. Wilson

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.
E. O. Wilson

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the "environmentalist" view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.
E. O. Wilson

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
E. O. Wilson

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
E. O. Wilson

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?
E. O. Wilson

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.
E. O. Wilson

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
E. O. Wilson