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.

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.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in 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 great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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.

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

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