Thomas Henry Huxley quotes - page 4

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:

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

Thomas Henry Huxley

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

Thomas Henry Huxley

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

Thomas Henry Huxley

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

Thomas Henry Huxley

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle ... Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.

Thomas Henry Huxley

If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as "chalk."

Thomas Henry Huxley

I adopt Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, therefore, subject to the production of proof that physiological species may be produced by selective breeding; just as a physical philosopher may accept the undulatory theory of light, subject to the proof of the existence of the hypothetical ether; or as the chemist adopts the atomic theory, subject to the proof of the existence of atoms; and for exactly the same reasons, namely, that it has an immense amount of primâ facie probability: that it is the only means at present within reach of reducing the chaos of observed facts to order; and lastly, that it is the most powerful instrument of investigation which has been presented to naturalists since the invention of the natural system of classification and the commencement of the systematic study of embryology.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Scientific men get an awkward habit - no, I won't call it that, for it is a valuable habit - of believing nothing unless there is evidence for it; and they have a way of looking upon belief which is not based upon evidence, not only as illogical, but as immoral.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Abram, Abraham became By will divine Let pickled Brian's name Be changed to Brine!

Thomas Henry Huxley

Within the last half century, the labours of such men as Von Baer, Rathke, Reichert, Bischof, and Remak, have almost completely unravelled... the successive stages of development which... are now as well known to the embryologist as are the steps of the metamorphosis of the silk-worm moth to the school boy.

Thomas Henry Huxley

It appears to us to be one of the many peculiar merits of that [Mr. Darwin's] hypothesis that it involves no belief in a necessary and continual progress of organisms.

Thomas Henry Huxley

These examples... show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.

Thomas Henry Huxley

M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

Thomas Henry Huxley

History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.

Thomas Henry Huxley

We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered.

Thomas Henry Huxley