There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.

- William Kingdon Clifford

No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

- William Kingdon Clifford

Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least …

- William Kingdon Clifford

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

- William Kingdon Clifford

The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose t…

- William Kingdon Clifford

The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of even…

- William Kingdon Clifford

Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog h…

- William Kingdon Clifford

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

- William Kingdon Clifford

To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.

- William Kingdon Clifford