I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned; thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.

. . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible.

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

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.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

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.

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.