The birth of science was the death of superstition.

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

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.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.