Quotes By Thomas Huxley

The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.