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Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.
Thomas Huxley
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Thomas Huxley
Age: 70 †
Born: 1825
Born: May 4
Died: 1895
Died: June 29
Anatomist
Anthropologist
Biologist
Carcinologist
Ichthyologist
Linguist
Naturalist
Paleontologist
Philosopher
Photographer
Physiologist
Lexington
Kentucky
T. H. Huxley
Huxley
Sense
Throat
Left
Determination
Past
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Men
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Perhaps
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Middle
Throats
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Common
Fools
More quotes by Thomas Huxley
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.
Thomas Huxley
The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of Spiritualism is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a séance.
Thomas Huxley
The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome-not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.
Thomas Huxley
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
Thomas Huxley
Material advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year has its applications to nations and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.
Thomas Huxley
I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
Thomas Huxley
Not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt.
Thomas Huxley
Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a seance.
Thomas Huxley
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
Thomas Huxley
If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.
Thomas Huxley
History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Thomas Huxley
... our Physick and Anatomy have embraced such infinite varieties of being, have laid open such new worlds in time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that the eyes of Vesalius and of Harvey might be dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of their grain of mustard seed.
Thomas Huxley
It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable'.
Thomas Huxley
I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything...
Thomas Huxley
In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.
Thomas Huxley
Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
Thomas Huxley
Whatever part of the animal fabric whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison the result would be the same the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.
Thomas Huxley
[Scientists] have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it however it may jar against their inclinations.
Thomas Huxley
I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
Thomas Huxley
That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.
Thomas Huxley