“Lavoisier was right in the deepest, almost holy, way. His passion harnessed feeling to the service of reason; another kind of passion was the price. Reason cannot save us and can even persecute us in the wrong hands; but we have no hope of salvation without reason. The world is too complex, too intransigent; we cannot bend it to our simple will.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

"The Passion of Antoine Lavoisier", p. 366
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

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Stephen Jay Gould 274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

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