Top 100 Quotes About Darwin
#1. Somewhere, Charles Darwin nodded and smiled a knowing smile.
David Wong
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. You know teenage boys, you own one-Mason Lerner
Natasha Larry
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better.
Amy Stewart
#8. We don't want to be the conquistadors. We want to be Charles Darwin.
Lydia Millet
#9. Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it.
Rich Cohen
#10. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#11. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould
#12. 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
#13. Animals manifestly enjoy excitement, and suffer from annul and may exhibit curiosity.
Charles Darwin
#14. [On Malaysia:] Mr. Darwin says so truly that a visit to the tropics (and such tropics) is like a visit to a new planet. This new wonder-world, so enchanting, tantalising, intoxicating, makes me despair, for I cannot make you see what I am seeing!
Isabella Bird
#15. They would ask people to do
something that is wrong? I thought angels were ... " She stumbled, trying to
think of a word to describe her preconceived notion. "Angelic," Jaycie Lerner
Natasha Larry
#16. 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
#17. Darwin may have been quite correct in his theory that man descended from the apes of the forest, but surely woman rose from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot.
Margot Datz
#18. I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.
Charles Darwin
#19. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.
Stephen King
#20. Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.
David H. Hubel
#21. Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.
Frans De Waal
#22. To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it.
D. James Kennedy
#23. I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
Charles Darwin
#24. Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.
Erasmus Darwin
#25. Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.
Charles Darwin
#27. Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
Richard Dawkins
#28. 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
#29. In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.
Charles Darwin
#30. I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.
Charles Darwin
#31. He who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.
Charles Darwin
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.
Charles Darwin
#35. Haylee shook her head as soon as they were gone. Christ, how can our family be mankind's best hope?
Natasha Larry
#36. Darwin's theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.
Max Tegmark
#37. 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
#38. I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?
Susan Glaspell
#39. We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy.
Jerry A. Coyne
#40. A teacher's job is to take a bunch of live wires and see that they are well-grounded.
Darwin D. Martin
#41. On your life, underestimating the proclivities of finches is likely to lead to great internal hemorrhaging.
Charles Darwin
#42. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin
#43. We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.' -Charles Darwin to wife Emma upon loss of daughter Annie
Deborah Heiligman
#44. The main conclusion here arrived at ... is that man is descended from some less highly organized form.
Charles Darwin
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Darwin believed in intellectual progress, but he believed that it would come smoothly and harmoniously and happily and it would eventually cover the whole world.
James Moore
#48. Whatever the degree to which Darwin may have "misled science into a dead end," the biologist Shi V. Liu observed in commenting on Koonin's paper, "we may still appreciate the role of Darwin in helping scientists [win an] upper hand in fighting against the creationists.
David Berlinski
#49. The key to spontaneous wit is an unburdened mind.
Darwin Ortiz
#50. 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
#51. There seems to be one quality of mind which seems to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions go unnoticed.
Francis Darwin
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
Charles Darwin
#55. Music was known and understood before words were spoken.
Charles Darwin
#56. Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Charles Darwin
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.
Trofim Lysenko
#60. 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
#61. For all the creationists out there, Darwin's just an atheist. But he was actually agnostic.
Henry Ian Cusick
#62. Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.
Leonard Darwin
#63. My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
Steven Wright
#64. A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
Charles Darwin
#65. Well, my mother did teach me a killer family recipe for a Bloody Mary. I guess I can make that next Thanksgiving-Haylee Mitchell
Natasha Larry
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first.
Erasmus Darwin
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.
Martin Rees
#74. 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
#75. That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another - that, in fact, has never been observed.
Robert J. Sawyer
#76. Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.
Charles Darwin
#77. 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
#78. Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER'D STEAM! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
Erasmus Darwin
#79. 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
#80. In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.
Herbert A. Simon
#81. Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.
Charles Darwin
#82. Darwinism is not eugenics, but all eugenicists were devoted Darwinists, staring with Darwin's sons Leonard.
A.E. Samaan
#83. 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
#84. What an extraordinary thing it is, Mr. Darwin seems to spend hours in cracking a horse-whip in his room, for I often hear the crack when I pass under his windows.
Charles Darwin
#86. [T]he young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.
Charles Darwin
#87. I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects ...
Charles Darwin
#88. Darwin says people like you need to die. (Carrow)
Kresley Cole
#89. We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
Charles Darwin
#90. Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.
Richard Dawkins
#91. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.
Charles Darwin
#92. Despite his genius, what Darwin didn't know about sex could fill volumes. This is one of them.
Christopher Ryan
#93. The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.
Charles Darwin
#94. Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable. For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man.
Primo Levi
#95. 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
#96. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.
Charles Darwin
#97. Darwin has done more to change human thought than all the priests who have existed.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#98. 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
#99. To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs
but a tribute nevertheless.
George Steiner
#100. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.
Francis Maitland Balfour
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