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For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.

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
Look
Turned
Tied
Shudders
Looks
Weakness
Ministers
Enterprises
World
Sea
Cover
Deliberately
Turn
Enterprise
Weaknesses
Share
Thrown
Realities
Turns
Round
Neck
Reality
Rounds
Minister
Better
Awful
Necks
Millstone

More quotes by Thomas Huxley

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The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.
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The known is finite, the unknown infinite spiritually we find ourselves on a tiny island in the middle of a boundless ocean of the inexplicable. It is our task, from generation to generation, to drain a small amount of additional land.
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I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men
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It sounds paradoxical to say the attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors.
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If individuality has no play, society does not advance if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes.
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The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.
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If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps....To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.
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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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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
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. . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible.
Thomas Huxley
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The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.
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And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.
Thomas Huxley
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Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.
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Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
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History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
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There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.
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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.
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It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
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If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.
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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.
Thomas Huxley