Thomas Huxley Quotes

When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.

Increase of material comforts, it may be generally laid down, does not in any way whatsoever conduce to moral growth.

The evil arising from mental improvement can be corrected only by a still further progress in that very improvement. Either morality is a fable, or the more enlightened we are, the more attached to it we become.

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races - without poverty, ignorance and disease!

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.

I take the ethical truths to be the stable elements that emerge out of ethical progress and that are retained under further ethical progress.

I should like to bring a case to trial: Prosperity versus Beauty, Cash registers teetering in a balance against the comfort of the soul.

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: -- I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

Money is not everything, but it is better than having one's health.

Are you better off than you were four years ago? One of my favorite quotes Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores ... Is there more or less unemployment?

We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

Moral progress is a process of isolation; the mountain tops are lonely.

You know, whatever it takes. It's very important obviously from an economic point of view because of the need for innovation, for progress, to improve the standard of living of people. But I also think it's a critical issue in geopolitics too.

Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.

Press forward at all times, climbing forward toward that higher ground of the harmonious society that shapes the laws of man to the laws of God.

Massive progress has been made in the last five years. More progress has to be made in terms of fiscal union and banking union.

In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the [1952] election, found the intellectual "in a situation he has not known for a generation." After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it "the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.

Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year

We've tried ignorance for a thousand years. It's time we try education.

Although wealth may not bring happiness, the immediate prospect of it provides a wonderfully close imitation.