Stephen Jay Gould Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• I love to read the dedications of old books written in monarchies for they invariably honor some (usually insignificant) knight or duke with fulsome words of sycophantic insincerity, praising him as the light of the universe (in hopes, no doubt, for a few ducats to support future work); this old practice makes me feel like such an honest and upright man, by comparison, when I put a positive spin, perhaps ever so slightly exaggerated, on a grant proposal.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Dedication, Men

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "The Razumovsky Duet" (p. 263), 1995.

• Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Latin, Book, Italian

  Interview With Michael Krasny, www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

• Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. [...] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Design, Example

  "The Panda's Thumb". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. "Double Trouble", pp. 38-40, 1980.

• I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Long, Brutus

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.9, W. W. Norton & Company

• A rare book at once of great importance and wonderful to read.... Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology , recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case.... A major addition to the scientific literature.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Data, Racism

• Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  War, Book, Years

  "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Preface, p. 10, 1987.

• I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Believe, Book, Sleep

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Preface, p. 16, 1989.

• [T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Style, Ordinary

• In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Smart, Book, School

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