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

And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.

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

[Scientists] have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it however it may jar against their inclinations.

It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

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