Quotes from Charles Darwin

Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life

Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.

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

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties... The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine

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.

Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

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.

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

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?

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.

We must, however, acknowledge as it seems to me, that a man with all his noble qualities...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

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, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

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

We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.