Evolution Quotes

Carl Sagan

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

Brian Tracy

Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others.

Vera Nazarian

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things - stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Tom Althouse

Is it a weakness not being able to hate? Or is it preparation for what is inevitable, the ability only to love.

Tom Althouse

Time is an illusion, only the keepers of the illusion are real, and the reality they have spun, keeps us, until we set upon the path of the dream.

Tom Althouse

To win or lose often depends on set parameters. Expand the bounds of what is possible, and you may come out the true winner, outside the confines of its defining.

Tom Althouse

More and more obstacles seem to be other people's issues that form in the way of a hand to block one, to take notice of them? Sometimes noticing ahead of time, and taking the time to notice them, makes the hand part of an arm that embraces you. The obstacles become bridges for both to cross over, even if in opposite directions.

Jennifer Ott

What happens to the world when science stops evolving?

Idries Shah

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.. Idries
In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.

Bryant McGill

The truth can do years of work in seconds.

Osho

With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you - that's my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you.

Mark Twain

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Bill Hicks

Folks, it's time to evolve. That's why we're troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything's failing? It's because, um – they're no longer relevant. We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

Rachel Carson

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

Carl Sagan

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the
I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.

Alecia Stone

Creativity sparks originality which then manifests itself into what we call evolution. To depreciate imagination is to depreciate life.

Carl Sagan

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with
The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)

Daniel C. Dennett

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

Friedrich Nietzsche

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

Jostein Gaarder

A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.

Jonas Salk

Are we being good ancestors?

Idries Shah

Opportunity's precious, and time is a sword.. Idries Shah
Opportunity's precious, and time is a sword.

Richard Ronald Allan

She captured the spot of my world’s centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.

Haruki Murakami

Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.

Idries Shah

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

Galileo Galilei

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Richard Dawkins

Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?

Michael Shermer

...evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith.. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say 'I believe in gravity," one should not proclaim 'I believe in evolution.

Rachel Held Evans

(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.

Helen Simonson

He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought-some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain.

William Morris

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

Albert Einstein

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

Idries Shah

Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.. Idries Shah
Learn about hornets from those who have been stung by them.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

Richard Dawkins

Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.

Sydney Harris

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

Michael Shermer

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

Christopher Hitchens

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.

Jonathan Haidt

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

George Gaylord Simpson

The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]

George Gaylord Simpson

If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

Idries Shah

Saying of the Prophet
Understanding
Speak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.

Idries Shah

Saying of the Prophet
Ink and Blood
The ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr.

Idries Shah

Saying of the Prophet
Envy
Envy devours good deeds, as a fire devours fuel.

Idries Shah

Saying of the Prophet
Humility
Humility and courtesy are themselves a part of piety.

Karl Lagerfeld

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

Karl Lagerfeld

Fashion is about two things: the evolution and the opposite.

Deepak Chopra

To only responsible choice I can make is to be love and happiness." Vincellent

"Love the world as you love yourself".Lao Tze

"The next step in mans evolution will be the survival of the wisest.

Tom Althouse

Some people spend their whole lives seeking heaven,
when all they needed to do was look about them,
and embrace that which was already there.

Tom Althouse

No matter how busy we may believe we are, we have the wonderful opportunity presently of investing time with loved ones. For those are the great investments we will be glad we made, when time begins to slow and the ability to tend turns tender.

Charles Darwin

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Carl Sagan

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Richard Dawkins

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Albert Hofmann

It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature.

Eoin Colfer

The Theory of Evolution has more holes in it than a dam made out of Swiss cheese.

Charles Darwin

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult-at least I have found it so-than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

Michael J. Behe

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

Peter Medawar

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

Sam Harris

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

Robert Ardrey

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

Robert Wright

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

Daniel C. Dennett

To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant - inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.

Richard Dawkins

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

Jonathan Wells

Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution.

Gareth J. Nelson

The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.

Homer W. Smith

The best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is the imagination.

Michael Crichton

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

G.K. Chesterton

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

E.J.H. Corner

...but I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.

Jane Goodall

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

Isaac Newton

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.

Jacques Monod

A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

Charles Darwin

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

Richard Dawkins

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

Richard Dawkins

Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.

Jerry A. Coyne

These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve.

Robert J. Sawyer

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another - that, in fact, has never been observed.

Vladimir L. Voeikov

The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.

Raul O. Leguizamon

I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma. Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all. Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as George Bernard Shaw used to say.

Michael Shermer

Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. (80)

Garth Stein

However, I don’t understand why people insist on pitting the concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What’s wrong with that idea?

Charles Darwin

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

Scopes Trial

Q: But what do you think that the Bible, itself, says? Don't you know how it was arrived at?
A: I never made a calculation
Q: What do you think?
A: I do not think about things I don't think about.
Q: Do you think about things you do think about?
A: Well, sometimes.

Paul Charles William Davies

Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.

Richard Dawkins

O darwinismo é uma teoria de processos cumulativos tão lentos que se desenrolam ao longo de milhares e milhões de anos. Todos os nossos juízos intuitivos sobre o que é provável mostram-se errados por larga margem.

George Gaylord Simpson

Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.

Piero Scaruffi

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

Nick Lane

The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters

Natalie Angier

In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura, or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced.

Kelly Jacqueline

I consoled myself with Granddaddy's words on the fossil record and the Book of Genesis: It was more important to understand something than to like it. Liking wasn't necessary for understanding. Liking didn't enter into it.

David C. Catling

However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.

Stefan Molyneux

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years.

Richard Dawkins

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

Carl Sagan

The secrets of evolution, are time and death.

There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.

Idries Shah

The Sufis,' runs the saying, 'understand with their hearts what the most learned scholars cannot understand with their minds

David Quammen

Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

Edward O. Wilson

Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive.

James D. Watson

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

Kevin Michel

What believer of faith among us can claim to understand the exact mechanistic structure of a world created by a god/God.

Bryant McGill

Evolve your understanding of success from the outer realm of control, materialism, and ego, to the inner realm of surrender, spirituality, and compassion.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Swami Dhyan Giten

Despite 2000 years of evolution in modern times, we have still not managed to develop the intelligence to create a society that knows what love is. Our society is still not a civilization, it is still primitive and barbaric.

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