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Thomas Huxley

49 quotes

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist and educator known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his fierce advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. A gifted writer and speaker, Huxley championed scientific education, coined the term "agnostic," and fought to make scientific knowledge accessible to ordinary people.

“The medieval university looked backwards it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.”

— Thomas Huxley

Knowledge

All Quotes by Thomas Huxley

“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.”

— Thomas Huxley

Power

“The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.”

— Thomas Huxley

Great

“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

Wisdom

“If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”

— Thomas Huxley

Knowledge

“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.”

— Thomas Huxley

Nature

“Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.”

— Thomas Huxley

Freedom

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”

— Thomas Huxley

Learning

“I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.”

— Thomas Huxley

Fear

“The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.”

— Thomas Huxley

Best

“The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

— Thomas Huxley

Great

“The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.”

— Thomas Huxley

Truth

“Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.”

— Thomas Huxley

Science

“Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!”

— Thomas Huxley

Religion

“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.”

— Thomas Huxley

Education

“The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.”

— Thomas Huxley

Freedom

“In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.”

— Thomas Huxley

Art

“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

Politics

“Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.”

— Thomas Huxley

Science

“Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”

— Thomas Huxley

Science

“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”

— Thomas Huxley

Faith