Evolution Quotes

It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than humans would at first suppose.

Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.

He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

Farewell Australia! You ... are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.

I believe our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.

Democracy and violence can ill go together. Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side.

The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.

To go forward you have to leave something behind.

Some call it evolution, And others call it God.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.