Charles Darwin

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.

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

To kill an error is as good a service as to establish a new truth.

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

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

What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.

The expression of the emotions in man and animals.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

We are not here concerned with the first origin of life.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become so absorbed in any one subject as I am in mine.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.

I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.

I have gradually come to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.