Charles Darwin — "I have felt a considerable reluctance to express myself in this chapter on the s…"

"I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit."

"I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men."

"Man has risen to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, is the best proof of his power of development."

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

"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…"