The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.

Heaven cannot brook two suns, nor earth two masters.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

I was hit by a car once on my bike, but I still rode home.

I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‚theory‘ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they’ve had forever. And they’ve been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

The earth laughs in flowers.

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‚The Color Purple‘ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That’s a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a bookmark.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.