E. O. Wilson

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.

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

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

'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.

I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

Because the living environment is what really sustains us.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.