My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

My belief is that no human being or society composed of human beings ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

There is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel it by a greater absurdity in Nature.

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

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.

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.