“If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?”

“Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over ...”

“It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves.”

“Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye ...”

“If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better.”

“The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. Its good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop ta...”

“Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there's you fellows who can't be trusted. And then there's the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not me...”

“Well-being is attained little by little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself.”

“Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside, is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent,...”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”