Quotes About Darwin

#1. The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin's theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors.

Trofim Lysenko

#2. Ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time.

David M. Raup

#3. Intelligent design cannot explain Darwinian evolution. Darwin's whole point is that variation and change are random and without higher purpose. We cannot imagine that God designed this disproof of His own existence.

James K. Galbraith

#4. Are you guys seriously messing around with real weapons?" she exclaimed. "It's like you want Darwin Awards!"

Tom flushed, and set his gun back on its hook. "It's not like we were going to start a dynastic war or something."

"Yeah," Vik said guiltily, returning his own weapon.

S.J. Kincaid

#5. Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

Karl Marx

#6. At the heart of Darwin's theory,

Elizabeth Kolbert

#7. In my view all salvation for philosophy may be expected to come from Darwin's theory

Ludwig Boltzmann

#8. Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.

Steven Johnson

#9. Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy. Darwin

Jenny Offill

#10. No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.

Richard Owen

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

Robert Green Ingersoll

#12. Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.

Trofim Lysenko

#13. According to Darwin's theory, it's not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race.

Svetlana Alexievich

#14. What Darwin did to nature, Sigmund Freud did to the self.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

#15. Mr. Darwin refers to the multitude of the individual of every species, which, from one cause or another, perish either before, or soon after attaining maturity.

Richard Owen

#16. 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

#17. At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#18. In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.

John C. Lennox

#19. 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

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

Daniel Coyle

#21. Darwin was as much of an emancipator as was Lincoln.

William Graham Sumner

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

Frans De Waal

#23. 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

#24. Biology has progressed tremendously due to the model that Darwin put forth. But the black boxes Darwin accepted are now being opened, and our view of the world is again being shaken.

Michael Behe

#25. To understand Darwin's work, you have to distinguish between his theory of descent and his theory of natural selection. THe full name of the first is the theory of descent with modification. Some call it the fact of evolution, and some call it the doctrine of evolution.

Lee Spetner

#26. I find that most people that zealously defend Darwin have not actually read Darwin; definitely not Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man.

A.E. Samaan

#27. 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

#28. In fact, Darwin's own grandfather anticipated the central tenet of Lamarckism by some seven years: "All animals undergo perpetual transformations; which are in part produced by their own exertions ... and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity."

Erasmus Darwin

#29. trilobites and Darwin and my father's talk of the 'human animal.

Nancy Horan

#30. What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

Bertrand Russell

#31. Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.

Michael Pollan

#32. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

Thomas Henry Huxley

#33. Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

Jack Lemmon

#35. Marx called Darwin a plagiarist and Malthus a fraud. Now all Marxists are Malthusian Darwinists.

A.E. Samaan

#36. The first person to refer to Darwin's tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61

Tom Wolfe

#37. We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.

Daniel Dennett

#38. Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.

Trofim Lysenko

#39. The Christians had then struck back with a decal of a larger fish, labeled "TRUTH," eating the Darwin fish, which distilled Christianity to its core principle: the ultimate devouring of Science by the giant, horrific Jesus-fish.

Robert Kroese

#40. With every passing year we discover more evidence to support Darwin's revolutionary hypothesis that the cognitive and emotional lives of animals differ only by degree, from the fishes to the birds to the monkeys to humans.

Roger Fouts

#41. Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of 'Das Kapital' (which was found unread after his death).

Steve Jones

#42. A constant flickering confetti of butterflies showered the town of Darwin. Designer insects, I think of them now: there was something enormously wasteful, extravagant even, about the profusion of patterns and shapes and brilliant colours.

Peter Goldsworthy

#43. If you hide information from people, don't want people to see the Ten Commandments or don't want people to hear about Darwin, aren't we hiding things that we know from our future generations? I just think that that's incorrect.

John Mellencamp

#44. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing

Paul Kalanithi

#45. I love to read, and so I've been reading everything I can, not intensely, but I love to read so I read "Origin of Species" by Darwin and I can't make head or tail of E=MC squared by Einstein, but I try to baffle my way through that.

Anthony Hopkins

#46. Omaha, Nebraska. Sac City, Iowa. Alexandria, Indiana. Darwin, Minnesota. Hollywood, California. Alliance, Nebraska.

John Green

#47. In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory ...

Erwin Schrodinger

#48. Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

Richard Dawkins

#49. Darwin says your mother's a whore. Simple as that.

Cacilda Jetha

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. My world view is somewhat unique. I have learned from many great philosophers including Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Tagore, Emerson, and many more.

Debasish Mridha

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. Darwin's theory is as dead as he is. Everyone is surviving, fit or not. Years ago, any kid dumb enough to chase a shiny object down a well was dead, and out of the gene pool. Now they got the technology and medicine to save the fool so he can breed more open mouth breathers.

Lenny Bruce

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

Hunter Shea

#57. You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

Richard Dawkins

#58. 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

#59. LIFE CHANGES AHEAD? Darwin never said it was the strongest who survive; he never said it was the smartest either. He said it was the most adaptable. So, lets embrace our next life change with energy and euphoria. Lets make it positive and enlightening like never before. Carpe Diem

Lee Johnson

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

Rafael Cruz

#61. They want me to kill him because he didn't do well on their tests. This is a mismatch. I am Darwin's scythe. Nature scraping away the chaff.

Pierce Brown

#62. I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors.

John Elkann

#63. Before science, before the eighteenth century, religion answered the questions, and so in the nineteenth century for instance there was a real jostling between science and religion over the truth and this is why Darwin was so controversial.

Nell Irvin Painter

#64. Oh. Come on! I left my backpack on the bus. According to Darwin, you're a prime candidate for extinction. Too stupid to live!

Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

#65. A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs.

Albert Einstein

#66. If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.

Lev Shestov

#67. Darwin said if you made a list of eminent men, next of a list of eminent women, it was obvious that men were better at everything.

Jacky Fleming

#68. One of my earliest memories is being backstage at 'Bran Nue Dae' in Darwin when I was about eight. It's such a fun, happy show and a real celebration of being Aboriginal ... it felt really great and achievable as a career. It all felt normal.

Shari Sebbens

#69. 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

#70. Indeed, not all attacks - especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin - are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

Hans Selye

#71. As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#72. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

Henry Adams

#73. The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts, to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.

Louis Agassiz

#74. We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.

Bruce Jackson

#75. Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.

Isabella Rossellini

#76. 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

#77. Darwin was a biological evolutionist, because he was first a uniformitarian geologist. Biology is pre-eminent to-day among the natural sciences, because its younger sister, Geology, gave it the means.

Charles Lapworth

#78. Darwin's theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though

Henri Bergson

#79. Darwin knew that the mother of the blush was shame. For Darwin, shame defines our essential humanity. Silvan Tomkins views shame as an innate feeling that limits our experience of interest, curiosity and pleasure.

John Bradshaw

#80. Prison is the only place, where Darwin's Theory of Evolution may seem to work. Survival of the fittest does only work, where the fittest is defined as the most loving.

Raphael Zernoff

#81. It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin's insights not only changed his contemporaries' view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.

James D. Watson

#82. Darwin was wrong. Man's still an ape

Jerome Lawrence

#83. Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

Trofim Lysenko

#84. Among the most important things to remember about evolution - and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors - is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To

David Quammen

#85. If Darwin could get into a submarine and see what I've seen, thousand of feet beneath the ocean, I am just confident that he would be inspired to sit down and start writing all over again.

Sylvia Earle

#86. There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this is so. It is simply a fact, Darwin's theory and the fossil record are in conflict.

David Berlinski

#87. Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.

Niles Eldredge

#88. Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes.

Richard Owen

#89. Despite some remaining puzzles, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin had this point right, that all creatures on earth are biological relatives

Michael Behe

#90. Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities - a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity - but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

Steven Johnson

#91. 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

#92. Evolution has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator - an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work.

Rodney Stark

#93. 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

#94. Darwin and his successors taught us how our biosphere evolved, and thereby transformed our conception of humanity's place in nature. In the twenty-first century, space scientists are setting Darwin in a grander cosmic context - probing the origins of Earth, stars, atoms and the universe itself.

Martin Rees

#95. Darwin is my copilot.

T. Rafael Cimino

#96. 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

#97. Darwin was a dreamer, I can assure you. No evolution or anything of the sort. For every one who can reason, I have to battle with nine orangutans.
Don Anacleto

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#98. Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.

Jerry Fodor

#99. 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

#100. We shall me much less miserable together.' -Emma Darwin to husband Charles upon grief for loss of daughter Annie

Deborah Heiligman