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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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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
Progress
Tribes
Nations
Savages
Natural
Continued
Supplant
Another
Selection
Exterminate
Highly
Subordinate
Degree
Civilised
Degrees
Subordinates
Depends
Savage

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The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity.
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Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
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It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
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It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
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Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.
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I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.
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If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste.
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Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
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Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.
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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 highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
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It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.
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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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What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?
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We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
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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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Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.
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