The Quotes canon
Sourced and curated.
Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Charles Darwin12 quotes
There is grandeur in this view of life...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. — Charles Darwin · 1859Man 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. — Charles Darwin · 1871I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection. — Charles Darwin · 1859We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World. — Charles Darwin · 1871When the views advanced by me in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history. — Charles Darwin · 1879Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving. — Charles Darwin · 1859All 12 quotes →Richard Dawkins4 quotes
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. — Richard Dawkins · 1986It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. — Richard Dawkins · 1986Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations. — Richard Dawkins · 2006Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense. — Richard Dawkins · 1976Stephen Jay Gould2 quotes
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction. — Stephen Jay Gould · 1996Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay. — Stephen Jay Gould · 1989Erasmus Darwin1 quote
Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the comencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament which the Great First Cause endured with animality... And thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end! — Erasmus Darwin · 1794George Gaylord Simpson1 quote
Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. — George Gaylord Simpson · 1949Jean-Baptiste Lamarck1 quote
FIRST LAW: In every animal... A more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ... While the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears.
SECOND LAW: All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature in individuals... Are preserved by reproductions to the new individuals which arise. — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck · 1809Malcolm1 quote
If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is. — Malcolm · 1993Michael Crichton1 quote
The history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way. — Michael Crichton · 1953Robert Ardrey1 quote
Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. — Robert Ardrey · 1961