Top 100 Quotes About Evolution
#1. Unsettling because it reveals some possible branch of evolution in which sex organs will no longer exist. The bots won't need them, and perhaps without them, the entire concept of gender will disappear.
Judd Trichter
#2. The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.
Jerry A. Coyne
#3. What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.
Mario Puzo
#4. It's easy to tell who the folks are that don't believe in evolution. They're the ones who have refused to participate in it.
Daniel J. Solove
#5. Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.
Eric Chaisson
#6. The point of Jesus' existence wasn't to lessen or diminish our appreciation of each other, but to expand our appreciation of each other by reminding us what lies within all of us, because Jesus was an example of the pinnacle of human evolution.
Marianne Williamson
#7. 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
#8. You can only succeed. You cannot fail. Failure is impossible; it is an illusion. Nothing is a failure. Nothing. Everything moves the human story, and hence the process of evolution, forward. Everything advances you on your journey.
Neale Donald Walsch
#9. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
Carl Sagan
#10. The greatest surprise of human evolution may be that the highest form of selfishness is selflessness.
Robert E. Ornstein
#11. The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
Bernard Beckett
#12. In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.
James Henry Breasted
#13. Evolution isn't over. We are the experience that the universe is having.
Richard Bandler
#14. I simply can't look into the heavens on a crisp starry night and somehow bring myself to believe that the gaping expanse that engulfs the whole of me is the product of chance happenstance. And neither can I believe that the gaping expanse that rests within me is anything less.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#15. Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way.
Eileen Myles
#16. Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to 'consciousness' of human knowledge.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#17. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution. ~ Jean Shinoda Bolen
Beth Buelow
#18. Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction.
Abhijit Naskar
#19. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since
Kim Stanley Robinson
#20. Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.
Ernst Mayr
#21. Shed who you think you are, in order to experience who you really are.
Evita Ochel
#22. All that is base in the masses is temporary, no doubt serving only to prevent evolution (that of the elite, as well) from proceeding too quickly and thus not becoming 'reality.'
Piet Mondrian
#23. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#24. This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.
Pope Benedict XVI
#25. APA is another evolution in my career; they have unique vision and share my goals for the future. I look forward to expanding our horizons together.
Paul Oakenfold
#26. Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche.
Carl Jung
#27. Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings ... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.
Leon Krier
#28. It may part of a one way evolution ... or it may be we are currently on the downside of an innocence cycle where one day, with an up cycle, sweet will be entertaining again.
Christopher Knight
#29. That man can interrogate as well as observe nature was a lesson slowly learned in his evolution.
William Osler
#30. Who can explain just how he became the person he is? It does not happen this day or that one. It is a gradual evolution that happens largely unheralded. He simply was who he now was.
David Anthony Durham
#31. There is no intrinsic tendency in gene pools for particular genes to increase or decrease in frequency. But when there is a systematic increase or decrease in the frequency with which we see a particular gene in a gene pool, that is precisely and exactly what we mean by evolution.
Richard Dawkins
#32. The quality of conversation appears to be a key factor in the evolution of an organization.
Philip Streatfield
#33. One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs.
Richard Holloway
#34. Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.
Pablo Picasso
#35. Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution.
Eric Hobsbawm
#37. If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#38. If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.
Idries Shah
#39. With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.
Richard Courant
#40. Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was sufficient, and species may have been created in succession at such times and in such places as to enable them to multiply and endure for an appointed period, and occupy an appointed space on the globe.
Charles Lyell
#41. I believe we have inherited a world of suffering that must be transcended through the development of pointed direction, fostering an evolution to a higher level of consciousness.
Albert Jackson
#42. Such, then, was my position: to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Launcelot and the Grail, and to believe in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service.
C.S. Lewis
#43. Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.
Andrew Carnegie
#44. If evolution is a struggle for survival, why hasn't it ruthlessly eliminated altruists, who seem to increase another's prospects of survival at the cost of their own?
Peter Singer
#45. The other day, a friend of a friend said that everyone started out as girls, but boys evolved ... But don't worry girls, I hit him.
Ben Mitchell
#47. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human conciousness ... seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature.
Eckhart Tolle
#49. Now take all these qualities together: order, balance, evolution and intelligence. What you have is a description of love. It's not the popular ideal, it is the wizard's love - the force that upholds life and nurtures it.
Deepak Chopra
#50. If you define evolution as merely meaning change over time, then I don't see any problem with a person being a Christian and believing in evolution. But that's not how textbooks define evolution. They define evolution as being random and undirected without plan or purpose.
Lee Strobel
#51. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.
Dan Simmons
#52. 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
#53. When you're fighting for civil rights, it's sometimes two steps forward and one step back. Civil rights are an evolution; and you have to bring people along.
Gloria Allred
#55. I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.
John B. S. Haldane
#56. The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.
H.L. Mencken
#57. The home was a closed sphere touched only at its edge by the world's evolution.
Ellen Key
#58. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.
Richard Ronald Allan
#60. Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#61. The vast majority of beings who incarnate on this planet are at the stage of their evolution where power is the dominant theme. They are learning about power. That is why we live in a world where there are so many wars and so much destruction.
Frederick Lenz
#62. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
#63. Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?
John Templeton
#64. If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.
George Gaylord Simpson
#65. Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.
Richard Dawkins
#66. The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
Carl Jung
#67. We're hard-wired by 200,000 years of evolution to be sensitive to the idea that someone might be watching us. They might be predators, after all. An uneasy feeling is perfectly natural if you suspect that someone has you in their ocular sights, whether it's a ghost or just some guy at the bus stop.
Seth Shostak
#68. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.
Stephen Batchelor
#69. What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
#70. However, there is another method, other than revolution, which is that of natural evolution, or rather the intellectual method with all its modes of education and up-bringing.
Ameen Rihani
#71. Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.
Idries Shah
#72. At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
Lewis Thomas
#73. The Truth about America's Silicon Valley-
Angels in the Silicon
Riveting and insightful regarding progressivism and the social upheavals living in the Silicon Valley.-
John Yoo, UC Berkeley Constitutional Lawyer, novelist, and public servant
Richard Theodor Kusiolek
#74. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#75. The beast exists because it is stronger than the thing that you call evolution. In it is some force of life, a demon, driving it through millions of centuries. It does not surrender so easily to weaklings like you and me.
Martin Berkeley
#76. We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself.
Goldwin Smith
#77. Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future.
Stefan Molyneux
#78. Women's evolution unfolded through stages in the last 100 years. The first stage was "Wonder Woman," an idealized figure who functioned like
Sylvia Becker-Hill
#79. You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.
Richard Dawkins
#80. All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.
Max McKeown
#81. Neither humans nor the Gods that they have created are superior to old Mother Nature.
Abhijit Naskar
#82. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.
David Quammen
#83. Thought without expression is dynamic and gathers volume by repression. Evolution when blocked and suppressed becomes revolution.
Nellie L. McClung
#84. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.
Jo Walton
#85. I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.
[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]
John T. Scopes
#86. We are only fully human when we act as if the life beyond us matters.
Caspar Henderson
#87. The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Stephen Jay Gould
#88. Common stock investors can make money by predicting the outcomes of practice evolution. You can't derive this by fundamental analysis - you must think biologically.
Charlie Munger
#90. Sufis aim to refine human consciousness. This is Sufi mysticism: not mystification or magic, but a specific Path.
Idries Shah
#91. Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#92. Fears of creating new kinds of plagues or of altering human evolution or of irreversibly altering the environment were only some of the concerns that were rampant.
Paul Berg
#93. Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.
Carl Sagan
#94. I don't think I'm severely politically active. I care deeply, and I have my strong personal beliefs. I think America is dancing on thin ice. But I think it's bigger even than a political issue. I wonder about the evolution of the human race and spirit and what our goals and reasons for living are.
Garry Shandling
#95. 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
#96. To spoon-feed people their comedy is not the proper evolution of the art.
Michael Mosley
#97. The dripping ... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, it's a natural part in the evolution of the work.
Keith Haring
#98. The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.
Ray Kurzweil
#99. You can perceive a person's aspiration if it is genuine, because this creates a change in the emanations from such a person.
Idries Shah
#100. The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.
Matthew D. Lieberman
