13 Quotes by John William Draper

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

Every movement in the skies or upon the earth proclaims to us that the universe is under government.

A divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction; it must repudiate all improvement in itself, and view with disdain that arising from the progressive intellectual development of man.

Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling.

Experimental investigation, to borrow a phrase employed by Kepler respecting the testing of hypotheses, is “a very great thief of time.” Sometimes it costs many days to determine a fact that can be stated in a line.

Is it not true that for every person the course of life is along the line of least resistance, and that in this the movement of humanity is like the movement of material bodies?

How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible, which falls into so many errors in the visible?

Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas.

So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer.