A Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.

Stephen Jay Gould

Quote Topics

Biological Enterprise Groups Highly Intellectually Irrelevant Label Rather Setting Value Whole Would

Quote Author

Stephen Jay Gould
American - Scientist
September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002

In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.

Edward Albee

Glory consists of two parts: the one in setting too great a value upon ourselves, and the other in setting too little a value upon others.

Michel de Montaigne

Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. ... Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value - a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value.

Arnold Schoenberg

An absolute being would be irrelevant to the world, as it couldn't create it. Any action, or causal process that would involve them, would make them relational. An absolute is the opposite of relative. So that's easy to understand, however, even though we understand that intellectually, which is very important to do, you don't transform yourself completely, yet.

Robert Thurman

Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

James Dyson

I thought Mr. Millward never would cease telling us that he was no tea-drinker, and that it was highly injurious to keep loading the stomach with slops to the exclusion of more wholesome sustenance, and so give himself time to finish his fourth cup.

Anne Bronte

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

Charles Darwin

Don't get stampeded by what people around you value. The task is to figure out what YOU value - and value highly enough to throw yourself into with unqualified passion.

David Maister

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

Mark Twain

Unsound minds like unsound Bodies, if you feed, you poyson. [Unsound minds, like unsound bodies, if you feed, you poison.]

George Herbert

I would not score very highly on religious value.

Lee Kuan Yew

We are ready to say that we rule the entire Elgin enterprise as irrelevant to the present.

Melina Mercouri

Use book value as a starting point to try and establish the value of the enterprise.

Walter Schloss

Punishment is but legalized crime. In a society built on prevention, rather than retaliation, there would be very little crime. The few exceptions will be treated medically, as of unsound mind and body.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value - sorry for the pun - we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event.