Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and tha… - Stephen Jay Gould

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

I like to think of myself as a tough-minded intellectual, a foe of all fuzziness from alien abductions to past-life regressions. I hate to think that an intellectual position, hopefully well worked out in the pages of this book, might end up as a shill for one of the great fuzzinesses of our age—so-called “political correctness” as a doctrine that celebrates all indigenous practice, and therefore permits no distinctions, judgments, or analyses.

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.