Dean Inge Quotes

I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.

What if it should be God's plan to people the world with better and finer material?

To think is of itself to be useful; it is always and in all cases a striving toward God.

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.

If, then, faith widens the connections, it elevates the man.

The man form is higher than the angel form; of all forms it is the highest. Man is the highest being in creation, because he aspires to freedom.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

He will be an extraordinary person, that pure American, who will be standing in my place five thousand years from today. He will have what no other human being has had in just the same richness, the inheritance of all ages, all races, all cultures…. a true superman, standing on the shoulders of those from all nations and races of the earth.

Man will put foward a goal to raise himself to a new level to create a higher sicio-biological type.

I think we give human beings too much credit. We're primates, you know.

The question is this: is man an ape or an angel? I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories.

There is another very specific quality which distinguishes them [man from animals], and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand.

Conservatives believe that human nature is what makes us imperfectible. Liberals believe that human nature can be changed and perfected.

What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the Earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.

For the majority of mankind, religion is a habit, or, more precisely, tradition is their religion. Though it seems strange, I think that the first step to moral perfection is your liberation from the religion in which you were raised. Not a single person has come to perfection except by following this way.

As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth, So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man

The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.

History is a record of the gradual negation of man’s original bestiality by the evolution of his humanity.

Instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey.

The final goal of all human endeavor is the development of the human soul.