306 Quotes by Thomas Huxley

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Whatever part of the animal fabric whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison the result would be the same the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.

No one who has lived in the world as long as you & I have, can entertain the pious delusion that it is engineered upon principles of benevolence... the cosmos remains always beautiful and profoundly interesting in every corner-and if I had as many lives as a cat I would leave no corner unexplored.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

Do what you can to do what you ought, and leave hoping and fearing alone.

And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.