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Thomas Henry Huxley

143 quotes

“The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of the story it has to tell; and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out together.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only two suppositions seem to be open to us — Either each species of crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen out of some pre-existing form by the operation of natural causes. Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for believing in the distinct creation of a score of successive species of crocodiles in the course of countless ages of time.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870); later published in Collected Essays, Vol. 8, p. 229
“If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. 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 any one who will take it of me.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Descartes' Discourse touching the method of using one's reason rightly and of seeking scientific truth" (1870)
“I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance — that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers, both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Medical Education" (1870)
“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 Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1871 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review in the Daily News (17 October 1871), quoted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, Vol. 1, p. 452
Also quoted by: Aldous Huxley (misattributed)
“I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1873 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said in reference to those who wished to abolish all religious teaching, rather than freeing state education from Church controls, in Critiques and Addresses (1873) p. 90
“Men are beginning, once more, to awake to the fact that matters of belief and of speculation are of absolutely infinite practical importance. ...Change is in the air. ... It insists on reopening all questions and asking all institutions, however venerable, by what right they exist, and whether they are, or are not, in harmony with the real or supposed wants of mankind. ...Consummate s question the value of learning; priests contemn dogma; and women turn their backs upon man’s ideal of perfect womanhood, and seek satisfaction in apocalyptic visions of some, as yet, unrealised epicene reality.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Universities, Actual and Ideal" (1874) in Collected essays (1894) p. 192.
“That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Universities, Actual and Ideal" (1874)
“The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Universities, Actual and Ideal" (1874)
“Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year, has its application to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1874 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joseph Priestley" (1874)
“The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the brutes have consciousness and no souls, then it is clear that, in them, consciousness is a direct function of material changes; while, if they possess immaterial subjects of consciousness, or souls, then, as consciousness is brought into existence only as the consequence of molecular motion of the brain, it follows that it is an indirect product of material changes. The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Study of Biology" (1876)
“The students of physical science are not unfrequently told that their pursuits unfit them for the estimation of moral probability. And it may be so, for I am afraid that to those who are accustomed to severe reasoning, either in the province of Science or in that of Law, reasoning from 'moral probability' is apt to be regarded as a process of accumulating inconclusive arguments, in the hope that a great heap of them may, at least, look as firm as one good demonstration.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection (1876)
“The man of science who commits himself to even one statement which turns out to be devoid of good foundation loses somewhat of his reputation among his fellows, and if he be guilty of the same error often he loses not only his intellectual, but his moral standing among them. For it is justly felt that errors of this kind have their root rather in the moral than in the intellectual nature.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection (1876)
“I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address on University Education" (1876), delivered at the formal opening of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, September 12, 1876. Huxley, American Addresses (1877), p. 125. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey…
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and, however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Technical Education" (1877)
“The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Technical Education" (1877)
“The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is, to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession, however infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1877 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Elementary Instruction in Physiology" (1877)
“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 Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth edition, (1876) Vol. III, "Biology", p. 689.
“Scientific men get an awkward habit — no, I won't call it that, for it is a valuable habit — of believing nothing unless there is evidence for it; and they have a way of looking upon belief which is not based upon evidence, not only as illogical, but as immoral.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1882 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Thomas Henry Huxley. "Lectures on Evolution Title: This is Essay# 3 from" Science and Hebrew Tradition." (1882); as cited in: William Trufant Foster, (1908) Argumentation and debating, p. 55
“The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1885 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature" (1885)
“Science … commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1885 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Darwin Memorial" (1885)
“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 Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1886 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Herbert Spencer (22 March 1886); this is often quoted with a variant spelling as: I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.
“The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1886 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Science and Morals" (1886)
“From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My reflection when I first made myself master of the central idea of the Origin was, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Another version of this quotation, omitting the "of me" phrase, appears in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, p. 170
“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Missionaries, whether of philosophy or of religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rousseau's writings are so admirably adapted to touch both these classes that the effect they produced, especially in France, is easily intelligible.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On The Natural Inequality of Men" (January 1890)
“The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On The Natural Inequality of Men" (January 1890)
“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 Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Autobiography (1890)
“The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1892 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to E. Ray Lankester (11 April 1892) Huxley Papers, Imperial College: 30.448
“Abram, Abraham became By will divine Let pickled Brian's name Be changed to Brine!”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1894 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poem in letter Joseph Dalton Hooker (4 December 1894) in response to hearing that Hooker's son had fallen into a salt vat. Huxley papers at Imperial College London HP 2.454
“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A favourite comment, inscribed on his memorial at Ealing, quoted in Nature Vol. XLVI (30 October 1902), p. 658
“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 Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Aphorism #367, in Aphorisms and Reflections (1907) edited by Henrietta A. Huxley, his widow
“God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Nature Vol. 149 (Jan-Jun) 1942 p. 291, and A Philosophy for Our Time (1954) by Bernard Mannes Baruch, p. 13
“Not far from the invention of fire... we must rank the invention of doubt.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Collected Essays vol 6, viii; quoted in T. H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist, and Educator (1950) by Cyril Bibby, p. 257
“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 Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Huxleyism: the theory of the anthropoid descent of man and its inevitable consequences.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Clarence Edwin Ayres, Huxley (1929) p. 242
“Darwin's bulldog was patently a man of almost puritanical uprightness.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cyril Bibby in 'T.H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist and Educator (1959) p. 56
“It was worth being born to have known Huxley.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Edward Clodd, biologist and biographer in Memories (1916), p. 40
“I think his tone is much too vehement.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1854 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Charles Darwin in letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker about Huxley's Royal Institution lecture in 1854
“My good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel; i.e. the Devil's gospel.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) first seen 1860 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: This humorous remark closes a letter by Charles Darwin, to Huxley (8 August 1860), but it can also be interpreted as referring to Louis Agassiz, rather than Huxley himself.
“Huxley created laboratory instruction in England and left a host of devoted pupils. Professor relates that when he once happened to prove the master in error by a series of dissections, Huxley exclaimed: " 'Pon my work, you're right! You've got me! I was wrong!”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century — perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: H. L. Mencken in "Thomas Henry Huxley" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (4 May 1925)
“All of us owe a vast debt to Huxley, especially all of us of English speech, for it was he, more than any other man, who worked that great change in human thought which marked the Nineteenth Century.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: H. L. Mencken in "Thomas Henry Huxley" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (4 May 1925)
“The row was over Darwinism, but before it ended Darwinism was almost forgotten. What Huxley fought for was something far greater: the right of civilized men to think freely and speak freely, without asking leave of authority, clerical or lay. How new that right is! And yet how firmly held! Today it would be hard to imagine living without it. No man of self-respect, when he has a thought to utter, pauses to wonder what the bishops will have to say about it. The views of bishops are simply ignored. Yet only sixty years ago they were still so powerful that they gave Huxley the battle of his life.”
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) said by 1895 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: H. L. Mencken in "Thomas Henry Huxley" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (4 May 1925)