Thomas Huxley

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

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

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

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

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.

It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable'.