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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 chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.”

— Thomas Huxley

Nature

All Quotes by Thomas Huxley

“Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.”

— Thomas Huxley

Money

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

— Thomas Huxley

Knowledge

“History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.”

— Thomas Huxley

History

“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

“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

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

— Thomas Huxley

Freedom

“The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.”

— Thomas Huxley

Nature

“In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.”

— Thomas Huxley

Work

“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

“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”

— Thomas Huxley

History

“Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.”

— 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

“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.”

— Thomas Huxley

Fear

“Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.”

— Thomas Huxley

Science

“My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

— Thomas Huxley

Business

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

— Thomas Huxley

Best

“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.”

— Thomas Huxley

Happiness

“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

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.”

— Thomas Huxley

Nature

“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