Related:

• 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....
• The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major ground
  he creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand yea...
• The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
  -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Ma...
• We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
  -- Stephen Jay Gould...
• Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention i
  because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false....
• 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....
• If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence
  hen we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy-- *sic transit gloria mundi*....
• 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....
• Anybody can make a fortune. It takes genius to hold on to one. -- Jay Gould