E. O. Wilson Quotes

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

I would like to live a day in the life of an ant and hope not to get squashed.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

Together, the ants eat the elephant.

Let us turn elsewhere, to the wasps and bees, who unquestionably come first in the laying up of a heritage for their offspring.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

Pre-history tells us that our species used to be a hunter-gatherer society. This means that the job of raising a family was split 50-50 between the men and the women - the man's 50 percent share was to sit in the woods with a sharp stick, waiting for something to hunt to wander by, and the woman's 50 percent was to do everything else.

Ants are a curious race

Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

An Oxe is taken by the horns, and a Man by the tongue.

Dogs like to obey. It gives them security.

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course, it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them.

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Flies are busiest about leane horses.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.

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.

The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.