# Quote — Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies

> If I choose to impose individual blame for all past social ills, there will be no one left to like in some of the most fascinating periods of our history. For example […] if I place every Victorian anti-Semite beyond the pale of my attention, my compass of available music and literature will be pitifully small. Though I hold no shred of sympathy for active persecution, I cannot excoriate individuals who acquiesced passively in a standard societal judgment. Rail instead against the judgment, and try to understand what motivates men of decent will.

- Author: [Stephen Jay Gould](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould.md)
- Book: [Eight Little Piggies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies.md)
- Page: 269
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould#Eight_Little_Piggies_(1993)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/if-i-choose

## More from this book

> Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.

p. 77 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/contingency-is-rich.md)

> [W]e do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn't seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past […]. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.

p. 206 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/w-e-do-live.md)

> Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?

p. 324 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-jay-gould/eight-little-piggies/perhaps-i-am-just.md)