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Not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt.

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
Fire
Must
Rank
Skepticism
Invention
Atheism
Doubt

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Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this lifeleads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.
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The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
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The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
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Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
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There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
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I wish you would let an old man, who has had his share of fighting, remind you that battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.
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Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
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Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.
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To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.
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There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.
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In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.
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Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.
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[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.
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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.
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It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
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The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
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The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.
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Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth
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Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
Thomas Huxley
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I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.
Thomas Huxley