I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

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.

Science is simply common sense at its best.

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

Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.