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 Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

The one process ongoing in the 1980s 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 that our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
- E. O. Wilson Quote

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?
- E. O. Wilson Quote

There is no better high than discovery.
- E. O. Wilson Quote

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.
- E. O. Wilson Quote

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
- E. O. Wilson Quote

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 Quote

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
- E. O. Wilson Quote

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
- E. O. Wilson Quote