It is a truly wonderful fact - the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity - that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group.
This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
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.
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.
We are optimists, until we are not.
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.
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.
There is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammalsin their mental faculties
In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.
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