Thomas Huxley

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

'Infidel' is a term of reproach, which Christians and Mohammedans, in their modesty, agree to apply to those who differ from them.

There is far too much of the feeding-bottle in education and young people ought to be supplied with good intellectual food and then left to help themselves.

Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

And you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric.

Science is simply common sense at its best.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth

If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but people and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?