Origin Of Species Quotes

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.

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

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.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Mere chance … alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.

… not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

Agassiz, when I saw him last, had read but a part of Origin of Species. He says it is POOR-VERY POOR!!. The fact is, he is very much annoyed by it.

I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this;-we can perceive that events are brought about, not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular ease, but by the establishment of general laws.

Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession of Siamese Twins, the whole evolved by natural and orderly processes from one microscopic parent germ.

Atheism has been on the rise for years now, and the Bible of the atheists is The Origin of Species.

Sir Julian Huxley, one of the world’s leading evolutionists, head of UNESCO, descendant of Thomas Huxley – Darwin’s bulldog – said on a talk show, ‘I suppose the reason we leaped at The Origin of Species was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.’.

To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.

Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved

I read the ‘Old Testament’ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‘The Origin Of Species’, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree