E. O. Wilson Quotes

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

The march of the human mind is slow.

I have this feeling that as time goes on, we're not getting any more civilized, and we should be. We're still running around like the days of Genghis Khan. There are so many important, better things to do and we need to encourage people to reach into the brighter side of humanity and not encourage people to continue to glorify the darker side.

Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume.

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature

Any man who stands for progress has to criticize, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith. If after considerable reasoning one is led to believe in any theory or philosophy, his faith is welcomed. His reasoning can be mistaken, wrong, misled and sometimes fallacious. But he is liable to correction because reason is the guiding star of his life. But mere faith and blind faith is dangerous: it dulls the brain, and makes a man reactionary.

That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

Therein lies the greatness of man. Fear is never allowed to dominate that desire for greater knowledge and as long as mankind retains that spirit we will move forward.

True progress consists in submitting the human element which corrupts liberty, to the divine element which purifies it. Society has followed a different path in looking upon the empire of faith as dead; and in proclaiming the empire of reason and the will of man.

I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.

We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.

The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.

While the future is unknowable, the winds always blow in the direction of human progress.

Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.

Men in general desire the good and not merely what their fathers had.

I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.

The plain fact is religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key deciscions made by religious people. By irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state, not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.