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It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
Botanist
Carcinologist
Entomologist
Ethologist
Explorer
Geologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Travel Writer
The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
Constant
Race
Whether
Character
May
Doubted
Distinctive
Named

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During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.
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Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.
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As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
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There is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammalsin their mental faculties
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A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones
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Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.
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The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.
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On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
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Hence, a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.
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It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.
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Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.
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If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.
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Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.
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But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.
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What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.
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It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science.
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A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
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Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.
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To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
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