I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.

I see no good reason why the views given this volume [The Origin of Species] should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, 'as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.'

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.