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Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.

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
Natural
Foundation
Craving
Science
Laws
Satisfy
Found
Comfort
Conduct
Stills
Wants
Lays
Still
Alone
Discover
Ascertain
Ideas
Law
Driven
Cravings
Knowledge
Seeking
Desiring
Spiritual
Morality
Foundations

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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.
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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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The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
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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'.
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Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization
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Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.
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Science is simply common sense at its best.
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The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
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Fact I know and Law I know but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?
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No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
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The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
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Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
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Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
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Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.
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The birth of science was the death of superstition.
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Genius as an explosive power beats gunpowder hollow and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck among friends and foes.
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Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.
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There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact.
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Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.
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