“I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident […] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border—and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.”
"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 389–390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)
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Stephen Jay Gould 274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002Related quotes
"Miss World"
Song lyrics, Live Through This (1994)
Source: "...and the truth shall set you free" , chapt. 19
Letter to Lord Godolphin (12 September 1707), from Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 250.
“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.”
A Superscription. Compare: "My name is might have been; my name is never was; my name's forgotten", Courtney Love (with Hole), "Celebrity Skin".
Source: The House of Life (1870—1881)
As quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune https://archive.ph/jzPX2 (November 1, 1990)
“And I can't believe that we would lie in our graves,
Dreaming of things that we might have been.”
Lie in Our Graves
Crash (1996)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 39.