I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing untapped potential and talents in ordinary people beyond famous individuals.
Stephen Jay Gould highlights a profound observation regarding the unnoticed brilliance that exists among the many individuals who have lived ordinary lives, particularly those in labor-intensive jobs. He suggests that while we celebrate the intellect of renowned figures like Einstein, we must also acknowledge the talented individuals whose abilities were never realized due to their circumstances, emphasizing a broader understanding of potential and human worth.
In practice
This quote could be used to inspire students who may feel overlooked in their abilities.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.
The founding of our Nation was more than a political event; it was an act of faith, a promise to Americans and to the entire world. The Declaration of Independence declared that people can govern themselves, that they can live in freedom with equal rights, that they can respect the rights of others.
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
A scientist may not be sure of the answer, but he's often sure he can find one. And that's a condition which is clearly not enjoyed by philosophy.
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
Because dogs and cats still live in the original state of connectedness with Being, they can help us regain it. When we do so, however, that original state deepens and turns into awareness.
Have "eternal wait," infinite patience. When you have infinite patience, you will realize God belongs to you. Either through awareness or through practice you reach the same spot.
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