Charles Darwin

The universe is not the result of chance. The universe is the result of an underlying order.

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

Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was a hermaphrodite!

I cannot see why a man, or other animal, should not have lived much longer.

The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.

In scientific investigations, it is permitted to doubt; but when a probable fact has been passed and confirmed by the observation of several good and judicious observers, it is then impious to doubt of it.

I was a very bad judge of poetry.

The formation of a new species is a very slow process.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals.

We are not here concerned with the question of the origin of the higher mental powers, but only with that of the moral sense.

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

We are all descended from a common ancestor.

The expression of the emotions by the voice is a much more important element in the communication of feeling than has been generally supposed.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

But I am very poorly today and very stupid and I hate everybody and everything.

The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.

The most important of all the differences between man and the lower animals is the moral sense or conscience.

We can allow that man has descended from some ape-like creature, but we cannot allow that he has descended from a savage.

The expression of the emotions in man and animals is of the highest interest, not only to the naturalist, but also to the artist and to the psychologist.

The survival of the fittest is the law of the jungle.