Darwin quotes:

Charles Darwin quotes:
thinkexist.com/quotes/charles_darwin/2.html

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

“A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.”

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

“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic”

“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 degree.”

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

“An American Monkey after getting drunk on Brandy would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men”

“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.”

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”

“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.”

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

“I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.”

“…it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.”

“The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.”

“The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”

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

“It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the ‘race is for the strong’ and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.”

Any comments?

Emotions are the henchmen of the Will, and Mnemosyne’s shorthand. A heart of stone is just that.

I read all the quote, and I’ve seen many of them. We’ve all seen the first one. It is still my favorite because people are always misquoting him and saying that “the strong survive”… but that isn’t quite right. It is the most adaptable to change.

[continuation…] When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

I disagree with you, Spock. I always liked McCoy Better.

Interesting quotes Dan.

They show a side of Darwin that many ignore, including Evangelicals, simply that he could be critical of his own theories, he knew evolution was open to revision and criticism.

Some of these quotes turn around some assumptions we may or may not have about Darwin.

i.e. Not so much survival of the fitessed but of the most adaptable, the most able to improvise. Much more dynamic than simply - any Linear interpretation of evolution being simply a straigh line of progress.

Molto Interesante!

Yeah,
It’s pretty bad:
What fundies did to Darwin AND Jesus… ouch X(