Thomas Henry Huxley quotes

Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist and anthropologist, best known for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Often called "Darwin's Bulldog," he played a key role in promoting scientific education and evolution in Victorian society. He made significant contributions to comparative anatomy and championed science as the foundation of modern knowledge. Here are 214 of his quotes:

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Thomas Henry Huxley

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

Thomas Henry Huxley

What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

Thomas Henry Huxley

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Thomas Henry Huxley

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

Thomas Henry Huxley

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and, however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Science has taught... me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

Thomas Henry Huxley

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

Thomas Henry Huxley

There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.

Thomas Henry Huxley