Gould Quotes & Sayings

They say desire is this endless loop. You can't get out of it even when you get what you desire."
"Why is that?"
"Because as soon as you get what you want, you're going to want it again, or want more. And since you can never really be satisfied, you suffer. Or if you use up what you desired, you suffer even more. — Peter Gould

I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've always had some sort of intuition that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings, you need "x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x" represents I don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio. — Glenn Gould

A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner. — Glenn Gould

Adam Johnson was a revolution when he came on — Bobby Gould

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. — Stephen Jay Gould

Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile, white obtained on the death of its princes. — Sabine Baring-Gould

Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology. — Stephen Jay Gould

When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device. — Stephen Jay Gould

Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece. — Leslie Marmon Silko

One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind. — Glenn Gould

I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them. — Stephen Jay Gould

My fantasy football team got mixed up in another fantasy and now they're stuck on a pirate ship with a chick in a Catwoman suit. — Dana Gould

I do not believe that since man was in the habit of living on this planet anyone has ever lived possessed of the impudence of Jay Gould. — Jay Gould

When homeless people go camping, how do they know? — Dana Gould

Shaking people up." Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. "Art should be given the chance to phase itself out," Gould — Thomas Bernhard

The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves). — Stephen Jay Gould

At last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail.
No more moon in the water. — John Gould

Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world — Stephen Jay Gould

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. — Stephen Jay Gould

Why do old people drive with their mouths open? — Dana Gould

You rarely get a convincing lecture on playing to your strength from a bald guy with a ponytail. — Dana Gould

On many accounts, Cornwall may be regarded as one of the most interesting counties of England, whether we regard it for its coast scenery, its products, or its antiquities. — Sabine Baring-Gould

I love scenes with minimal dialogue. — Peter Gould

Grief can be an incredible source of energy. For good. — Peter Gould

Keep my word' is such a strange expression. At first glance, it just means 'Be true to what you agreed on. But it could also mean, 'Hold your words back.' Keep them in. Let your actions speak instead. — Peter Gould

In this world, one thing you should definitely strive for is originality. Just be who you are, and be your own person. That's what will make you stand out. — Nolan Gould

The fame of Maria Foote's beauty and charm of manner had reached London, and in May 1814, she made her first appearance at Covent Garden Theatre and personated Amanthis in 'The Child of Nature' with such grace and effect that the manager complimented her with an immediate engagement. — Sabine Baring-Gould

There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows. — Steven Gould

So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex. — Elizabeth Gould Davis

In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities. — Stephen Jay Gould

Why not pick up the new full-length motion picture at the corner drugstore and then run it through one's
home TV receiver? — Jack Gould

I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research. — Stephen Jay Gould

I got mugged about six months ago. The oddest thing about the entire situation, though, was that I wasn't afraid, which is strange because basically I experience my life through two primary emotions: fear and suppressed fear. — Dana Gould

Rejected names for World War II: 'Global Super Killfest', 'Germaniacal Japandamonium', 'World War 1: New Moon'. — Dana Gould

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it. — Stephen Jay Gould

If studies on lab rats are any indication, human beings have a deep-seated fear of a big, scary cat being let into their cage. — Dana Gould

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*? — Stephen Jay Gould

There was a second problem that was still not a technical problem ... the project became classified. I couldn't work on it after having gone to all that trouble. I was considered a security risk, so I could not get a clearance. — Gordon Gould

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality. — Stephen Jay Gould

A hungry man thinks only about how he can feed his family today. He doesn't care that how he feeds them today destroys his children's tomorrow. — Steven Gould

Mankind progresses not smoothly, as by a sliding carpet ascent, but by rugged steps broken by gaps. He halts long on one stage before taking the next. Often he remains stationary, unable to form resolution to step forward - sometimes even has turned round and retrograded. — Sabine Baring-Gould

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter. — Emily Gould

The Marine Aquarium Council really wants us to keep the coral and the fish safe. They are not saying it is bad to have an aquarium in your house, just that you should make sure when you buy fish for your aquarium ... they have been Marine Aquarium Council-certified. — Alexander Gould

The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined. — Stephen Jay Gould

Mediaeval mythology, rich and gorgeous, is a compound like Corinthian brass, into which many pure ores have been fused, or it is a full turbid river drawn from numerous feeders, which had their sources in remote climes. — Sabine Baring-Gould

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. — Stephen Jay Gould

Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data (for who needs proof of anything so obvious). And few intellectual activities can be more salutary than attempts to find out whether these rocks of ages might crumble at the slightest tap of an informational hammer. — Stephen Jay Gould

Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth. — Stephen Jay Gould

I am surprised." She scanned the script rapidly. "Th-this is a p-pack of lies!" He looked worried. "Have you always had that little speech impediment?" he asked cautiously. "N-no, it's my souvenir from the Escobaran psych service, and the l-late war. Who came up with this g-garbage, anyway?" The line that particularly caught her eye referred to "the cowardly Admiral Vorkosigan and his pack of ruffians." "Vorkosigan's the bravest man I ever met." Gould took her firmly by the upper arm, and guided her to the shuttle hatch. "We have to go, now, to make the holovid timing. Maybe you can just leave that line out, all right? Now, smile. — Lois McMaster Bujold

What did you - " He swallowed. His voice was raspy. "What did you do to him?"
"Sightseeing. Your turn."
He shivered. "No, that's all right. — Steven Gould

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories. — Stephen Jay Gould

I was a tap dancer as a child, so I understand precision and repetition. — Elliott Gould

When I finally invent a time machine you will already know about it because I'll have told you a long time ago. — Dana Gould

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. — Glenn Gould

In a Republican district I was a Republican. In a Democratic district I was a Democrat. And in a doubtful district, I was Doubtful. But I was always for Erie. — Jay Gould

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould — Jonathan Haidt

Wisdom, Power and Goodness meet
In the bounteous field of wheat. — Hannah Flagg Gould

The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning. — Stephen Jay Gould

Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness. — Glenn Gould

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut. — Stephen Jay Gould

It is beyond my comprehension that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simply because others use it for different purposes. — Steven Gould

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. — Stephen Jay Gould

Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest instead of an arrogant S.O.B. like me, what comes naturally, you don't see as a special skill. It's just you. It's what you've always done. — Stephen Jay Gould

Among the old Norse, it was the custom for certain warriors to dress in the skins of the beasts they had slain, and thus to give themselves an air of ferocity, calculated to strike terror into the hearts of their foes. — Sabine Baring-Gould

The average permanent lasts about four months. — Dana Gould

Earthquakes would be great if they could hit specific areas, like the parent lounge at a children's beauty pageant. — Dana Gould

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity. — Stephen Jay Gould

In North Germany, a troublesome ghost is bagged, and the bag emptied in some lone spot or in the garden of a neighbour against whom a grudge is entertained. — Sabine Baring-Gould

I dont think a really good pie can be made without a dozen or so children peeking over your shoulder as you stoop to look in at it every little while. — John Gould

Mr. Lecky had proceeded quickly for several moments before he drew up, shocked. A few more steps and he might have stumbled on his idiot, for the stairs he had been approaching were the front stairs to the silverware department, which he wished to avoid. Shaken by this unpleasant mistake, he re-directed himself, turning back down the center of the dark floor. Certainly he did not want to see the corpse; the corpse could not very well want to see him. — James Gould Cozzens

In France, successive waves of Gaul, Visigoth, and Frank have swept over the land and have dominated it. But the fair hair and blue eyes and the clear skin of the conquering races have been submerged by the rising and overflow of the dusky blood of the original population. — Sabine Baring-Gould

Glenn Gould was my hero. Glenn Gould was my idol. I loved him. — Warren Zevon

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant. — Stephen Jay Gould

My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky. — Glenn Gould

The national oil companies still want to acquire some expertise so they will outsource more, but not totally. — Andrew Gould

The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science. — Stephen Jay Gould

The board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim: "They still call it Kansas, but I don't think we're in the real world anymore." — Stephen Jay Gould

The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright. — Stephen Jay Gould

I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal. — Stephen Jay Gould

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority. — Emily Gould

If life begins at conception, but you can be born again later, only to live on eternally after death, what's the big deal about anything? — Dana Gould

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there. — Chester Gould

Know someone you hate? Give their kid a kazoo! — Dana Gould

Composing is my life blood. — Morton Gould

That was you?"
"Well, it wasn't Sailor Moon. — Steven Gould

Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny. — Stephen Jay Gould

The best part of chronic head lice is it takes away your fear of dying alone. — Dana Gould

The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile. — Glenn Gould

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die. — Stephen Jay Gould

When I was in high school, girls made fun of me for liking vampire movies. Now, I'd be their king. Time machine, where are you? — Dana Gould

Is John Motson still wearing his shepherdskin coat? — Bobby Gould

Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant. — Stephen Jay Gould

Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to, but be respected - that is essential. — Anna Gould

We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating ... second, that however bizarre and arcane our world might be, nature remains potentially comprehensible to the human mind. — Stephen Jay Gould

Do people in the Ku Klux Klan who die and come back as ghosts have to wear two sheets when attending the rally? — Dana Gould

Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans, we should cringe in embarrassment that, at the dawn of a new, technological millennium, a jurisdiction in our heartland has opted to suppress one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery. — Stephen Jay Gould

[In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds. — Stephen Jay Gould

Start with an honest analysis of why you are in opposition, not in government. — Philip Gould

To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glen in One... Glen Steinway, Steinway Glen, all for Bach. — Thomas Bernhard

Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa ... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles. — Stephen Jay Gould