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Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.

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
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Geologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Travel Writer
The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
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More quotes by Charles Darwin

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He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.
Charles Darwin
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Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity. Great God! how I should like to see the greatest curse on earth - slavery - abolished!
Charles Darwin
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Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.
Charles Darwin
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Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations whereas species were formerly thus connected.
Charles Darwin
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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
Charles Darwin
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With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin
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The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than the woman. Whether deep thought, reason, or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands.....We may also infer.....The average mental power in man must be above that of woman.
Charles Darwin
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The age-old and noble thought of 'I will lay down my life to save another,' is nothing more than cowardice.
Charles Darwin
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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!
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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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].
Charles Darwin
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There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved
Charles Darwin
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We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!
Charles Darwin
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Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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Great is the power of steady misrepresentation but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
Charles Darwin
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Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
Charles Darwin
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I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
Charles Darwin