Ed Baker

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

Nothing would be done at all if we waited until we could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.

I dream of men who take the next step instead of worrying about the next thousand steps

You shall not sue nice but principled people for libel, especially when they have the resources to fight back and so destroy your entire profession.

Thou shalt not confuse effect with affect for that is an abomination in the eyes of the Grammarians.

Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom.

I do believe that an intimacy with the world of crickets and their kind can be salutary - not for what they are likely to teach us about ourselves but because they remind us, if we will let them, that there are other voices, other rhythms, other strivings and fulfillments than our own.

Though snails are exceedingly slow,
There is one thing I'd like to know.
If I out run 'em round the yard,
How come they beat me to the chard?

It is not summer until the crickets sing.

To have a cricket on the hearth, is the luckiest thing in all the world!

And a locust unto Mahomet said: 'We are the army of the great God; we produce ninety-nine eggs; if the hundred were completed, we should consume the whole earth and all that is in it.'

The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands.

House, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe.

Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God.

But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

In recent years molecular biology has practically obliterated the difference between the living and the non-living. The simple fables of the religions of the world have come to seem like tales told to children."

Ethiopians imagine their gods as black and snub-nosed; Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired. But if horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like lions, making the gods resemble themselves.

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.

I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

People knew that animals were nocturnal but they didn't really know what they did because they couldn't see it.

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.

"Faith" is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see --
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try and give it to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.