Charles Darwin

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes no affections - a mere heart of stone.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature but by our institutions great is our sin.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy wasteful blundering low and horribly cruel work of nature!

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Animals whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equal.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.