Charles Darwin

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

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

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes no affections - a mere heart of stone.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature but by our institutions great is our sin.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy wasteful blundering low and horribly cruel work of nature!

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equal.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

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

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

I have called this principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term of Natural Selection.

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

Man is descended from a hairy tailed quadruped probably arboreal in its habits.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

We must however acknowledge as it seems to me that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

We can allow satellites planets suns universe nay whole systems of universes to be governed by laws but the smallest insect we wish to be created at once by special act.

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

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often endure long, but false views if supported by some evidence do little harm for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.