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Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

“I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.”

Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Book:An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas

Work

An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas

This book is a compilation of essays that delve into the world of literature and intellectual discourse, offering insights and reflections on the nature of books and the ideas they convey. more

Author

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was a renowned paleontologist, evolutionary theorist, science writer, and academic. He is known for his work in ornithology, paleontology, evolutionary theory, and speciation. Gould's writings and papers have had a profound impact on the scientific community, and he was a long-time contributor to the journal 'Nature'. more

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“As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.”

People Humans Has Beens Happens Political Cities Ecology Interference Usage

Book:An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas

Source: An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas

“Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.”

Years Memories Enormous Fascinating Tricksters

Book:Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

Source: Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. ( Aristotle , and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.”

Source: Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History

“Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.”

Source: Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history

“The truly awesome intellectuals in our history have not merely made discoveries; they have woven variegated, but firm, tapestries of comprehensive coverage. The tapestries have various fates: Most burn or unravel in the footsteps of time and the fires of later discovery. But their glory lies in their integrity as unified structures of great complexity and broad implication.”

Source: Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history

“Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.”

Facts Found Social Progress Creation Products Theory Evolution Scientist Construction Interaction Worldview Intertwined Great Scientist Social Construction

Book:Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history

Source: Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history

“Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite "thing" cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw "evolution" or "social organization," not to mention the more mundane "digestion" or "self-interest," without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.”

Source: Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history

“If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.”

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Book:Full House

Source: Full House

“Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer.”

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Book:Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin

Source: Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin

“When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius , in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet 's Madness.”