Quotes About Charles Darwin

#1. Somewhere, Charles Darwin nodded and smiled a knowing smile.

David Wong

#2. We don't want to be the conquistadors. We want to be Charles Darwin.

Lydia Millet

#3. By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.

James D. Watson

#4. We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.' -Charles Darwin to wife Emma upon loss of daughter Annie

Deborah Heiligman

#5. As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.

Margaret Atwood

#6. I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

Richard Dawkins

#7. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements.

Kurt Vonnegut

#8. The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are 'routine' scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts.

Martin Rees

#9. Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory ...

Stephen Jay Gould

#10. Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.

James Black

#11. If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin
the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#12. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. - Charles Darwin

Aleatha Romig

#13. As Charles Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many people acting like givers, who "were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

Adam M. Grant

#14. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question. Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

#15. Charles Darwin got totally hammered, woke up next to a monkey and decided he had to come up with a theory to make it all okay.

Stephen Colbert

#16. I have ceased to think even of barnacles!' -Charles Darwin

Deborah Heiligman

#17. The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder - it's almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin's ground-breaking theory of natural selection.

Mark Carwardine

#18. All sentient beings developed through natural selection in such a way that pleasant sensations serve as their guide, and especially the pleasure derived from sociability and from loving our families. - Charles Darwin

Rick Hanson

#19. Smoking crack is a way for people who couldn't afford college to study the works of Charles Darwin.

P. J. O'Rourke

#20. Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.

Richard Dawkins

#21. Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the 'Beagle,' and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman.

Seth Shostak

#22. I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book [The Origin of Species] than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science.
[Letter to Charles Darwin 12 Dec 1859]

Joseph Dalton Hooker

#23. [Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.

John Shelby Spong

#24. The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Charles Darwin

Jonathan Haidt

#25. All the professors in all the religious colleges in this country rolled into one, would not equal Charles Darwin.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#26. America's got a Darwin problem - and it matters. According to a 2009 Gallup poll taken on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, fewer than 40% of Americans are willing to say that they 'believe in evolution.'

Kenneth R. Miller

#27. People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.

Stephen Fry

#28. I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. - Charles Darwin

Daniel Coyle

#29. Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions.

Frans De Waal

#30. I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.

John Shelby Spong

#31. I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution.

James D. Watson

#32. How do you know that God didn't speak to Charles Darwin?

Jack Lemmon

#33. Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

Christopher McDougall

#34. On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut

#35. A shy man no doubt dreads the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them. He may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence about trifles in the presence of strangers.
Charles Darwin

Susan Cain

#36. What may be less familiar is the idea that the evolution of the conventions of our language might involve what Charles Darwin called "artificial selection.

Daniel Cloud

#37. Galton was a world renowned anthropologist back in the nineteenth century, though he was a big overshadowed by his cousin, Charles Darwin.

Hunter Shea

#38. I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: "'Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity ... '"
"Darwin was right," Nebogipfel said gently.

Stephen Baxter

#39. I can use the teachings of [Charles] Darwin to promote communism.

Rafael Cruz

#40. Evolution was Vladimir Ilich Lenin's problem. Lenin lead the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and took over Russia. He killed the Zar [ sic ] and his family in cold blood. There would not be communism in Russia today if had not been for Charles Darwin's book on evolution.

Kent Hovind

#41. I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

Denis O'Hare

#42. Many of the most accomplished people of our era were considered by experts to have no future. Jackson Pollock, Marcel Proust, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Lucille Ball, and Charles Darwin were all thought to have little potential for their chosen fields.

Carol S. Dweck

#43. Only a few years ago there was no person too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#44. If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes.

Robin A. Weiss

#45. It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#46. From a ball of mud taken from a birds plumage, Charles Darwin raised 82 separate plants, belonging to five distinct species!

Rachel Carson

#47. When most of us hear the phrase, 'survival of the fittest,' we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn't exist anywhere in Darwin's first edition of 'Origin of the Species.'

Joel A. Barker

#48. Charles Darwin wrote a famous book in 18 gibberish. And that book was an interesting book, cuz it was called "Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-Monkey-You"

Eddie Izzard

#49. This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.

{The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer's 'excellent expression' in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul 1866).}

Herbert Spencer

#50. The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University.

Carl Honore

#51. I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.

Matt Ridley

#52. Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.

Jared Diamond

#53. I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think i behaved in a paltry manner (Charles Darwin)

Abram Kardiner

#54. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.

Charles Darwin

#55. Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

Charles Darwin

#56. Till facts be grouped and called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen and to see the bearing of scattered facts.

Charles Darwin

#57. Although I am fully convinced of the truth of Evolution, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists. But I look with confidence to the future naturalists, who will be able to view both sides with impartiality.

Charles Darwin

#58. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

Charles Darwin

#59. One doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others." "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything ... nor ought one to blame others.

Charles Darwin

#60. Animals manifestly enjoy excitement, and suffer from annul and may exhibit curiosity.

Charles Darwin

#61. I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.

Charles Darwin

#62. Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.

David H. Hubel

#63. I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

Charles Darwin

#64. Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.

Charles Darwin

#65. The man who walks with Henslow.

Charles Darwin

#66. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Charles Darwin

#67. In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.

Charles Darwin

#68. I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.

Charles Darwin

#69. He who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

Charles Darwin

#70. Sexual selection acts in a less rigorous manner than natural selection. The latter produces its effects by the life or death at all ages of the more or less successful individuals.

Charles Darwin

#71. In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

Charles Darwin

#72. I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.

Charles Darwin

#73. It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.

Charles Darwin

#74. On your life, underestimating the proclivities of finches is likely to lead to great internal hemorrhaging.

Charles Darwin

#75. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Charles Darwin

#76. The main conclusion here arrived at ... is that man is descended from some less highly organized form.

Charles Darwin

#77. I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.

Charles Darwin

#78. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants.

Charles Darwin

#79. The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Charles Darwin

#80. But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand.

Charles Darwin

#81. The young blush much more freely than the old but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion.

Charles Darwin

#82. On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

Charles Darwin

#83. Music was known and understood before words were spoken.

Charles Darwin

#84. Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

Charles Darwin

#85. In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.

Charles Darwin

#86. The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.

Charles Darwin

#87. From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.

Charles Darwin

#88. A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.

Charles Darwin

#89. Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle.

Charles Darwin

#90. I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.

Charles Darwin

#91. I long to set foot where no man has trod before.

Charles Darwin

#92. About weak points [of the Origin] I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.

Charles Darwin

#93. Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.

Charles Darwin

#94. There is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be NATURALLY SELECTED.

Charles Darwin

#95. Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.

Charles Darwin

#96. To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

Charles Darwin

#97. The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.

Charles Darwin

#98. Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.

Charles Darwin

#99. Darwinism is not eugenics, but all eugenicists were devoted Darwinists, staring with Darwin's sons Leonard.

A.E. Samaan

#100. Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

Charles Darwin