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There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties...The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
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If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
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Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.
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I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
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...for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.
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Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, ... I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.
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At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.
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I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.
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The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be overestimated as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages.
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What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
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Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life
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It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.
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It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved that the subject was in the air, or that men's minds were prepared for it. I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.
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People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].
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Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.
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In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.
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We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
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Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.
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I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
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Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
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I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animal, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important....It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.
Charles Darwin