c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There are many examples where species share common plastic traits. What appears to be convergence may just be the plastic response of the organism to its environment. Examples include the following: Limbs that protrude from an animal’s body have more surface area per unit mass than the rest of the body. In cold weather the animal loses more heat per unit mass from these limbs than from other parts of the body. In many species the tails and legs are shorter for those living in colder climates and larger for those in warmer climates. Gulls’ wings are shorter in cold climates than in warm. Hares and foxes also have shorter ears in cold climates than in warm. Eskimos have shorter arms and legs than do people living in warmer climates. . . . Jodan’s rule: Many species of fish tend to have more vertebrae when they live in cold water than do the same species living in warm water. These differences have been shown to depend on the temperature at which the fish have been reared.
— What these rules show is not convergence. They show that different species adopt the same anatomical strategies when they have to cope with the same environmental conditions. We have seen that these strategies cannot come from random mutations. It is much more reasonable to say they come from environmental cues acting on the genetic program.
Verbal arguments should always be suspect.
— Lee Spetner
What I should have said is that he thinks that there is a conflict between evolutionary biology and theism. Dennett thinks that evolutionary theory shows that it is irrational to believe that God exists
—  he thinks that the theory has this consequence because he thinks that the Design Argument was the only remotely plausible argument for God’s existence and evolutionary theory destroyed that argument.
It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.
— Maurice Wilkins
Life is so diversified that to any statement I could make about living organisms there are exceptions. Because of the many exceptions, I should qualify everything I say with hedging phrases such as 'generally,' 'usually,' and 'almost always' But I'm afraid the constant repetition of these hedges will slow me down and bore you. So let's make a pact now that I forego the hedging phrases and you are to understand that almost all my statements may have rare exceptions.
— Lee Spetner
Dawkins mentioned two mechanisms: the theory of the ‘primeval soup’ and the Cairns-Smith theory. He discussed the latter in some detail. Since no one has computed, for either theory, the chances of the events occurring, Dawkins could not tell us what those chances are. The mechanisms of both theories, however, have every appearance of being very improbably – even to the point of being impossible.
— Lee Spetner
The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scientific theories -- a feeble echo of medieval church tyranny and hostility to learning, but an echo nonetheless are serious threats to freedom of inquiry and should be vigorously combated.
— S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader
It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
— Charles Darwin
The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
New Rule: You don't have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap. President Bush recently suggested that public schools should teach "intelligent design" alongside the theory of evolution, because after all, evolution is "just a theory." Then the president renewed his vow to "drive the terrorists straight over the edge of the e
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
— Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist
The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.
— Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as though he had dominion over her (when it was, in fact, the other way around). He treated her as an animal, and she didn't even see it. At the same time, the old dragon appealed to her to transcend the limits of her dignity. If she would reach for the forbidden, she would be "like God, knowing good and evil." He suggested that she was more than a human; she was a goddess.
— Russell D. Moore
[E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
— Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
If you wish to view this as a cautionary tale, be my guest.
— Philip Plait, Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...
Evolution is more about adaptivity than adaptability.
— Raheel Farooq
What believer of faith among us can claim to understand the exact mechanistic structure of a world created by a god/God?
— Kevin Michel, Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams
The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom.
— Quammen, David
Life is chemistry, not biology.
— Joey Lawsin, Originemology
Insularity plus time yields divergence.
— Quammen, David
Men are tested and tried amongst deceptions radically and they are winning for themselves abilities to give, to deliberate, to stand fast, to choose well, to discriminate.” “They are far from the 'automata' of the Universe some think them to be. They dance the starry path and are sharpening their knowledge with every orbit of each positive thought travelled.
— Gabriel Brunsdon, Azlander: Second Nature
You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer.
— Octavia E. Butler
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
— Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
They grew up, moulded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows, to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled, bitter, unwittingly vindictive.
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
...and specimens like this confirmed there had been some kind of divine rule in the universe because no natural selection process was up to the task of creating something like him. This was some god’s, somewhere’s, handiwork.
— Nicole  Williams, Crash
What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive life form – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection. 
— Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True
In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.
— Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.
— Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.
— George Saunders
Without death there is little innovation. Extinction - death of a species - is part and parcel of evolutionary change. In the absence of this kind of extinction new developments would not prosper. In our own history, periods when ideas have been perpetuated by dogma, preventing the replacement of old by new ideas, have also been times of stultifying stagnation. The Dark Ages in western society were the most static, least innovative of times. So the fact that trilobites were replaced by batches of successive species through their long history was a testimony to their evolutionary vigour.
— Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution
In the beginning, God created human beings, which is to say God put the ingredients together, embedded the instructions for building on the template, and put it all into four separate eggs marked 'Some Assembly Required.
— Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds
Some people are constructive, if you like. Others are destructive. It's this diversity in humankind that results in some making positive contributions and some negative contributions. It's necessary to have enough to make positive contributions to overcome the problems of each age.
— Jonas Salk
Where is your water? Know your garden.
— Hopi teaching
Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of science at all educational levels. Religious and other sorts of opposition have minimized the impact in general education of Darwin's contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
— Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve.
— Chip Walter, Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived
Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people? Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.
— Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
The wolf eats the lamb; the strong eats the weak. This is not God’s Order, because it lacks justice, ethics and goodness. This chaotic structure belongs to the evolution! Evolution is primitive and it lacks high intelligence; it moves ahead by crawling and it is faulty! He who calls this system as God’s Order openly insults God! We must know that God is not in this universe; He is somewhere else, somewhere where there is no evolution, where there is justice, ethics and goodness!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
My body lies within the strings and myths of reality with a purpose of evolution and adapted by gravity but for my conscious's matrix is without any doubt has adapted to other's consciousness and that is how we all adapt to survival.
— Ahmed Aziz Ahmed
Wars are an outdated way to try to solve conflicts, which is unacceptable in the 21st century. Instead of trying to conquer yourself, wars are an unconscious way to try to conquer life. Wars are an unconscious way to try to conquer death, which is the basic fear in the West.
— Swami Dhyan Giten
There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
Change is inevitable. Evolution, however, is optional.
All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.
— Max McKeown, Adaptability: The Art of Winning in an Age of Uncertainty
Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create... Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
— Lynn Margulis
One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.
— Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
I’ll give you a theory: Man’s closest relative is not the chimpanzee, as the TV people believe, but is, in fact, the dog.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth.
— Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
The theory of evolution also had a very great effect in alienating science from religion and creating a world in which one could go about studying the wonders of creation without ever having a sense of wonder in the religious sense of that term.
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr, A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World
New mutations don't create new species
—  they create offspring that are impaired.
You don’t have to solve it, only evolve it!
— Silvia Hartmann, Energy EFT: Energize Your Life From -10 to +10 With The Essential Next Generation A-Z Field Guide To Self-Help EFT Emotional Freedom Techniques
If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the multiplicity of life forms which we see on the surface of the earth and in the seas. This realization would also change the attitude that modern man has concerning the earlier periods of his own history, vis-a-vis other civilizations and also other forms of life. Consequently the theory of evolution continues to be taught in the West as a scientific fact rather than a theory and whoever opposes it is usually brushed off as religious obscurantist.
— Seyyed Hossein Nasr, A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World
As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: "Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.
— David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
Evolution is more about the condition of the heart of a man who does not want to acknowledge God than it is about the facts.
— John Yates
We are; therefore, we evolve.
— Geert Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind - Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival
It seems to me that the Russian prestige is declining and that America holds in its hands the immediate future of the world: as long as America knows how to develop the sense of the earth at the same time as her sense of liberty." [Written from Peking, October 1945, on the eve of departure, after having been stuck there since the war began.]
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Letters Of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan
Given enough time, even evolution evolves.
— Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.
— Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True
Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse.
— James D. Carswell
Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since
— Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
The male frog, in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover that if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears much larger than it really is.""So?""So that's what art is, for the artist," said Crake. "An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.""Your analogy falls down when it comes to female artists," said Jimmy. "They're not in it to get laid. They'd gain no biological advantage from amplifying themselves, since potential mates would be deterred rather than attracted by this sort of amplification. Men aren't frogs, they don't want women who are ten times bigger than them.""Female artists are biologically confused," said Crake.
— Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves.
— David Malouf, The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
Are you an evolutionist? I’m an absurdist, ma’am. But let’s suppose evolution is true; what about the monkeys today? Why can’t we see them evolving? Are they still evolving?
— Harrison Wheeler, Jesters Incognito: Live Like a King. Hire a Jester.
Evolution, energy, and ethics are the core elements that will guide us along the challenging path toward the Life Era: the first - evolution - because a good understanding of our universal roots and of our place in the cosmic scheme of things will help us create a feasible future course; the second - energy - because our fate will bear strongly on the ways that humankind learns to use energy efficiently and safely; and the third - ethics - because global citizenship and a planetary society are crucial factors in the survival of our species.
— Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos
In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will there be another super-superman to follow and another super-super-superman after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline come after, with return down the long line, through the superman down to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space?
— H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
...a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith ... to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. ... when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture ... either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. ...let us choose [the doctrine] which appears as certainly the meaning intended by the author. ... For it is one thing to fail to recognize the primary meaning of the writer, and another to depart from the norms of religious belief.
— Augustine of Hippo, On Genesis (Fathers of the Church)
I would not be too surprised to see a flying horse
—  I would consider it as a gift of the evolution
Darwinian evolution has obviously not had enough time to work.
— George Hammond
Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurian.”There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a “Marxist” with the same naturalness with which one is a “Newtonian” in physics or a “Pasteurian.” If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before.Such is the case, for example, of “Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that.Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and Engels’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today.But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought.This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument.
— Ernesto Che Guevara
We are here because over billions of years, countless variables fell into place, any of which could have taken another path. We are essentially a beautiful fluke, as are the millions of other species with which we share this planet. Our cells are composed of atoms and dust particles from distant galaxies, and from the billions of living organisms that inhabited this planet before us.
— Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.
— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.
— Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.
— Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
Nobody chooses to evolve. It's like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what's happening until they hit, then it's too late.
— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree.I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life. The limbs divided into great branches, and these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree was young, budding twigs; and this connection of the former and present buds by ramifying branches may well represent the classification of all extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear the other branches; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few have left living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these fallen branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.
— Charles Darwin
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
— Charles Stross, Accelerando
I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....
— Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about it. The game consists of lots of patient waiting and watching (stalking), throwing with incredible accuracy and speed, sprinting, dodging... and hitting moving objects real hard with clubs! And arguing. Hey, what else could you possibly need? Now, tell me, how do soccer or basketball prepare you to survive in the wild, hm?
— David Brin
We consciously decide whether to consider people
—  we fall in love despite ourselves
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
If we were truly created by God, then why do we still occasionally bite the insides of our own mouths?
— Dara Ó Briain
At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.
— Philip Nelson, Biological Physics: Energy, Information, Life
We have to try to control what we can or else we cannot judge progress.
— Lionel Suggs
A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.
— Charles Darwin
A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroquinone for 50 bombardier beetles, I am now about to mix the two together. According to the above, they will explode in my face. Here goes...Well... I'm still here! I poured the hydrogen peroxide into the hydroquinone, and absolutely nothing happened. It didn't event get warm!
— Richard Dawkins
We do not know how life began.
— Tracy Irwin Storer
Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.
— Markus Zusak
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
— Sid Ziff
Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
— Bertolt Brecht
Hair the color of lemons,'" Rudy read. His fingers touched the words. "You told him about me?"At first, Liesel could not talk. Perhaps it was the sudden bumpiness of love she felt for him. Or had she always loved him? It's likely. Restricted as she was from speaking, she wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to drag her hand across and pull her over. It didn't matter where. Her mouth, her neck, her cheek. Her skin was empty for it, waiting.Years ago, when they'd raced on a muddy field, Rudy was a hastily assembled set of bones, with a jagged, rocky smile. In the trees this afternoon, he was a giver of bread and teddy bears. He was a triple Hitler Youth athletics champion. He was her best friend. And he was a month from his death.Of course I told him about you," Liesel said.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
I'd like to bite that lip.
— E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey
We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it's easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found.
— Cecelia Ahern, Thanks for the Memories
I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
A book unopened alters not the ink on its pages. What is there is there.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Unbound
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. 
— W.H. Auden
Things change, friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody.
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
If invisible people eat invisible food does invisible wind blow invisible trees?
— Cecelia Ahern, If You Could See Me Now
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.
— Chuck Palahniuk
I hated the place, Tommy. I hated every second of every day. And it was all … your … fault!
— James Dashner, The Death Cure
Your party kicked so much ass!Even though you suck so much! It's like, instead of blood, your heart pumps liquid suck! But thanks for the beer!
— John Green, Paper Towns
I beg your pardon?” Catherine interrupted. “Are you implying that women have poor judgment?”“In these matters, yes.” Leo gestured to Christopher. “Just look at the fellow, standing there like a bloody Greek god. Do you think she chose him because of his intellect?”“I graduated from Cambridge,” Christopher said acidly. “Should I have brought my diploma?”“In this family,” Cam interrupted, “there is no requirement of a university degree to prove one’s intelligence. Lord Ramsay is a perfect example of how one has nothing to do with the other.
— Lisa Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon
After the bitching I'd done to Abe about going to remote, crappy places, I should have been excited about the prospect of going to Sin City.
— Richelle Mead, Spirit Bound
He took my hand, made me stand on the branch and asked, "What can you see from here?" "Nothing" I said,"Know what I can see? From this distance everything is so bloody perfect".
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
-Mikhail?...Try making suggestions next time, or just plain asking. You go do whatever it is you're doing, and I'll go search you extensive library for a book on manners.-You will not find it.-Why am I not surprised?
— Christine Feehan, Dark Prince
Age is artificial. It's soulless. It doesn't matter one bit.
— Laurie Faria Stolarz, Bleed
I’ve never done this before. I didn’t go to human bars. Mudslides aside, I’m not much of a drinker. Club people are not my people. Now, book-club people—
— Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs
Why do I write?To be somewhere elseTo get free of ourselvesTo stopTo stop being anything or anywhere at allTo disappear
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
In a well-ordered universe...camping would take place indoors.
— Morgan Matson, Since You've Been Gone
Sometimes, before you make any plans or resolutions, before you declare your heroic intent to persevere, you just have to cry.
— Jaclyn Dolamore, Magic Under Glass
I’m so sorry. I don’t think the etiquette manuals cover this sort of situation.” He leaned in close, his lips all but grazing her neck, and inhaled. “Mmm. You smell good, too.”She nearly choked. Took a step backwards, until her back met cold stone. “Th-thank you.”“That’s better. May I kiss you?” His finger dipped into her shirt collar, stroking the tender nape of her neck.“I d-don’t th-think that’s a good idea.”“Why not? We’re alone.” His hands were at her waist.Her lungs felt tight and much too small. “Wh-what if somebody comes in?”He considered for a moment. “Well, I suppose they’ll think I fancy grubby little boys.
— Y.S. Lee, The Body at the Tower
I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.
— Helene Hanff, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street
Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need
— Judy Blume
From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.
— Charles Dickens, Hard Times
There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question.
— Antonia Michaelis
Plus as she put it, Prince Eric was far too hairy and peach colored for her taste. I always thought he was pretty hott, but then again, I am a mammal.
— Kiersten White, Paranormalcy
She stood up and took the book from him, and as he smiled over his shoulder at some other kids, she threw it away and kicked him as hard as she could in the vicinity of the groin.Well, as you might imagine, Ludwig Schmeikl certainly buckled, and on the way down, he was punched in the ear. When he landed, he was set upon. When he was set upon, he was slapped and clawed and obliterated by a girl who was utterly consumed with rage. His skin was so warm and soft. Her knuckles and fingernails were so frighteningly tough, despite their smal
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder
Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.
— Jeffrey Archer
In Chinese love stories the one who loves always starts by borrowing a book from the beloved.
— Dai Sijie, Once on a Moonless Night
You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never DO fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off.
— Rodman Philbrick, Freak the Mighty
Leave him alone!" Debbie shouted."Shut up, please, or I'll kill you," Mr Tiny replied.
— Darren Shan, Lord of the Shadows
Finally! You're here!"Uh....Do I know you?"Well, no....But you're here, all the same...
— Lynn Weingarten, Wherever Nina Lies
Sandar came to stand beside him, frowning down at the crumpled High Lord. "He does not look so mighty lying there," he said wonderingly. "He does not look so much greater than me.
— Robert Jordan, The Dragon Reborn
Dream 2 Defy! Extreme is not a style but a way of life.
— Jeff Hardy
You turned the page, i burned the book.
— Anonymous
A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.
— J.M. Coetzee, Summertime
The map was just an accessory. She knew exactly where she was.
— Galt Niederhoffer, The Romantics
I don't know, Mom. Now that I'm about to graduate, I plan on being more spontaneous."Mom opened her eyes and burst out laughing.I said, "Got spontaneity on the calendar for next Tuesday.
— Lara Avery, The Memory Book
Elizabeth, you resemble nothing so much as a hen trying to hatch a book.
— Julia Quinn, How to Marry a Marquis
Every action has a reaction,everything we do or say has an effect.
— Heidi Ayarbe, Freeze Frame
Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.
— Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
We love books because they are the greatest escape. That is because our own minds eye is the purest form of virtual reality.
— M.R. Mathias
But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
— Julian Barnes, Love, etc.
The wonderful thing about books--and the thing that made them such a refuge for the islanders during the Occupation--is that they take us out of our time and place and understanding, and transport us not just into the world of the story, but into the world of our fellow readers, who have stories of their own.
— Annie Barrows
a book is a box of words until you open it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.— Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475
— Norman Cousins
Books exceed authors' lifespan.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work - and it's author - in bondage.
— Dean Koontz, Relentless
Books aren't just booksthey're a completely different worldin the palm of your hands
— Charlotte
Stay gold Ponyboy. Stay gold.--Johnny quoting Robert Frost
— S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper -- maps are the most condensed humanized spaces of all...They make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of sights we can't see and spaces we can't cover.
— Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
— Philip Dormer Stanhope
The broken spine of the book shows the webbing of binder's string, and my fingers have worn white spots in the cover.
— Susan Straight
This is terrific. What a gorgeous kitchen. You’ve decorated it so beautifully. Now you’re going to have to clear all the counters. Vases. Books. Knickknacks. Get rid of all that stuff. I mean, it is just beautiful. Beautiful. I love what you’ve done with this house. Make sure you put it all away.” ~Real estate agent (p.76)
— Dominique Browning, Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas, and Found Happiness
If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit
— Stephen King
And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier.
— Kris Courtney
But here, two thousand miles from home, there was a real shipwreck, a real hope. A choice big enough to change our lives forever.
— Gordon Korman
I chew the inside of my lip, considering for a second what it would be like to slap this skinny little witch right across her tight-lipped little face. ~Kelly about Suni
— Bill Blais
‎"Sarge, mr. Nurd here is threatening to turn me to jelly.""really?" said Sarge. "what flavor?
— John Connolly, The Gates
Your very eyes. How they have always been for me the command to obey, the inviolable and beautiful commandment. No, no, I'm not telling lies. Your appearance in the doorway!...You have been my body's health. Whenever I have read a book, it was you I was reading, not the book, you were the book. You were, you were.
— Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten
An appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the in the centre of the Library here and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me on every hand.
— W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man
It was cliche, he knew, but he meant it classic.
— S.E. Hinton, Some of Tim's Stories
A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.
— William Godwin, Fleetwood or the New Man of Feeling
People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don't read it. [Regarding "The Fool's Progress"]
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.
— Madeleine L'Engle
And the book (#7) is for whenever the hunt involves a lot of waiting around. Entertainment that won't eat up my batteries is always worth bringing.
— Marie Lu, Warcross