1930s, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)
Context: In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place.
“The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”
Can biology do better than faith?, NewScientist.com, 2 November 2005, 2010-10-26 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8254-can-biology-do-better-than-faith.html,
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Edward O. Wilson 83
American biologist 1929Related quotes
“Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.”
Variant: Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.
Source: The Rommel Papers (1953), Ch. XI : The Initiative Passes, p. 244.
“Religion has no more place in science than science has in religion.”
Answer from Pasteur to his disciple Elie Metchnikoff when was questioned whether his approach to spontaneous generation was bound to a religious ideal. According to Patrice Debré's Luis Pasteur, 2000 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RzOcl-FLw30C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA176#v=onepage&q&f=false,, p. 176.
Disputed
Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 175
New York City (p. 260).
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)
Interviewed on the Danish Monitor radio programme 2005-11-30
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
“My conviction was justified: art, that which lasts, is based on mathematics.”
Cubism was born
as quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, Taschen, Köln, 2006, p. 60
posthumous Quotes