"Nothing I learned [in high school] had any bearing at all on the big and real questions. Who am I? What am I doing here? What is the world? What is my relationship to it?"

"I do not think evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty. On the contrary, it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important."

"Life is the most important thing about the world, the most important thing about life is evolution. Thus, by consciously seeking what is most meaningful, I moved from poetry to mineralogy to paleontology to evolution."