Quotes By Thomas Huxley

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

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

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

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

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

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 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.

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 only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

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.

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

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

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.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.