Charles Darwin

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

The highest good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

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.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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

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

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

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

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long.

How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!

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

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

Man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... bears a heavy burden of suffering.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who do not increase in numbers, is a stronger barrier to revolution than a hundred thousand armed and undisciplined men.

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

Believing, as I do, in the continuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our tables end.

The very essence of the creative process is that it is not planned, it is not predictable.

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.