Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

"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 in Science quotes.

"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 in Science quotes.

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."
-Stephen Jay Gould in Questioning quotes.

"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

"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

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."
-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

"The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning."
-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 proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations."
-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

"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the steward of life's continutity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to to it, but here we are."
-Stephen Jay Gould