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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.

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
Lying
Profit
Lost
Devil
Stills
Fame
Truth
Name
Still
Wife
Searched
Better
Names
Grounds
Children
Child
Penalty
Much
Belief
Penalties

More quotes by Thomas Huxley

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There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.
Thomas Huxley
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There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
Thomas Huxley
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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
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It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
Thomas Huxley
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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.
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.
Thomas Huxley
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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.
Thomas Huxley
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It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews--Micah, Isaiah, and the rest--who took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.
Thomas Huxley
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It is better to read a little and thoroughly than cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.
Thomas Huxley
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I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything especially as I am now so much occupied with theology but I don't see my way to your conclusion.
Thomas Huxley
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It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
Thomas Huxley
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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
Thomas Huxley
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I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as I can afford.
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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Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
Thomas Huxley
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In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.
Thomas Huxley
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The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
Thomas Huxley
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A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
Thomas Huxley
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If the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions.
Thomas Huxley
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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