Quotes About Evolution

Progress, that great heresy of degenerates.

Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it.

Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects

Passage into new forms, overleaping the bars of time and space, reversal of the laws of inanimate intelligent existence, had been mine to perform and to witness.

It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.

He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.

Man's habits change more rapidly than his instincts.

No! no arresting the vast wheel of time, That round and round still turns with onward might.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

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

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

Once upon a time there was an old country, wrapped up in habit and caution. ... We have to transform our old France into a new country and marry it to its time.