John Burroughs Quotes

I'm the product of 6 million years of evolution? Come on, man. I crawled out of a swamp yesterday.

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

As humans become civilized, the survival rate of the lazy, botched and dim-witted grow in inverse proportion to the productive segment since nature can no longer remove them from the species.

… the action of natural selection upon Man has ... been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions

People are still very uncomfortable with the idea that humans are not specially created species. I believe we are a fantastic species. But we are not created specially. That's very hard for people to accept in their day-to-day routine.

People have to evolve.

I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?

America's got a Darwin problem - and it matters. According to a 2009 Gallup poll taken on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, fewer than 40% of Americans are willing to say that they 'believe in evolution.'

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

Spencer's god was Evolution, sometimes also called Progress.

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is - a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Evolution is a fact. It is the best explanation of what is known from observations. It's a theory as powerful as the theory of gravity.

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

Evolution is the idea some people have to explain life without God.

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.