John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

When most of us hear the phrase, 'survival of the fittest,' we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn't exist anywhere in Darwin's first edition of 'Origin of the Species.'

And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!

I'm a Darwinian.

It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this [Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'] and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

[Evolution Theory] is the motivating factor for guys like Hitler and Stalin and George Bush, by the way, who is a Satan worshipper, like we don't know that.

I think it's a theory... the theory of evolution and I don't accept it as a theory.

Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

Charles Darwin got totally hammered, woke up next to a monkey and decided he had to come up with a theory to make it all okay.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

Politics is applied biology.

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim naturalistic philosophy when they think it safe to do so.

Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God's Word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success.

Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.

Fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis.

The Theory of Evolution has been proved true

He [Charles Darwin] had the greatest impact on the thinking of modern man, of anybody.

The Theory of Evolution has had over a million chances to be wrong, but never has been.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.