Quotes By Charles Darwin

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.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

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

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

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

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

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

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.