Charles Darwin

“I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be op...”

“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 Caterpilla...”

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

“My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”

“I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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 pleasu...”

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

“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.”

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

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