The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/’woo’], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education...

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very...

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.

The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its...

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.