Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
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.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.
Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory.
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.
We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love.
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
We pass through this world but once.
If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
Death is the ultimate enemy – and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.
Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn’t fascination as comforting as solace? Isn’t nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn’t curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?
The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
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.
The human mind delights in finding pattern – so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism – and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
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.