Thomas Huxley

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

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

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

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

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

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.