Charles Darwin

“לא קיים הבדל בסיסי בין האדם לבין בעלי החיים העילאיים ביכולת המנטלית שלהם.”

“דעתנו אינה נוחה מן המחשבה שבעלי החיים שאותם הפכנו לעבדינו משתווים לנו למעשה.”

“אנו יכולים לומר שלוויינים, כוכבים, שמשות והיקום כולו מודרכים על ידי חוקים מסוימים, אבל את הקטן שבחרקים אנו חפצים ליצור באמצעות חקיקה.”

“דירוג צורות החיים, תפקודיהם האורגניים, מנהגיהן ותזונתן, היא ראיה לכך שתזונתו הנורמלית של אדם היא צמחים, כמו ביונקים העילאים ובקופים הגדולים, שהניבים שלנו הם פחות מפותחים משלהם, ושאנו לא מיועדים להתחרות מול חיות בר או בעלי חיים טורפים.”

“בורות מולידה ביטחון עצמי לעיתים תכופות יותר מאשר ידע.”

“Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

“I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.”

“Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.”

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

“But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”

“I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”

“The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.”

“But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand - If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt.”

“A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.”

“Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”

“Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.”

“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 every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.”

“I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer's excellent expression of 'the survival of the fittest.' This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection.(Letter to A. R. Wallace July 1866)”

“It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.”

“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.”