Ernst Haeckel Quotes

#1. The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

Ernst Haeckel

#2. Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of "being and becoming!" That is the broad lesson of the evolution of the world.

Ernst Haeckel

#3. Politics is applied biology.

Ernst Haeckel

#4. By ecology we understand the total science of the connections of the organism to the surrounding external world.

Ernst Haeckel

#5. Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.

Ernst Haeckel

#6. Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race.

Ernst Haeckel

#7. Man is not distinguished from [the animals] by a special kind of soul, or by any peculiar and exclusive psychic function, but only by a higher degree of psychic activity, a superior stage of development.

Ernst Haeckel

#8. Man is not above nature, but in nature.

Ernst Haeckel

#9. There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European war' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.

Ernst Haeckel

#10. In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.

Ernst Haeckel

#11. Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.

Ernst Haeckel

#12. Mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest man.

Ernst Haeckel

#13. An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.

Ernst Haeckel

#14. Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.

Ernst Haeckel

#15. The nucleus has to take care of the inheritance of the heritable characters, while the surrounding cytoplasm is concerned with accommodation or adaptation to the environment.

Ernst Haeckel

#16. The whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all ... The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of an unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world.

Ernst Haeckel

#17. The cell never acts; it reacts.

Ernst Haeckel