Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or th…

- David Quammen

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

- David Quammen

What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. …

- David Quammen

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

- David Quammen

To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens witho…

- David Quammen

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

- David Quammen

[Theory is] an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. Tha…

- David Quammen

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

- David Quammen

Results "are no good unless they answer (or can be made to seem to answer, or can be twisted and wrenched and piled into odd shapes until they hint a…

- David Quammen