Thomas Huxley Quotes

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.

An idea consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of humanity in the next

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.

All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

years ago we would have been burned for this. Now what I am suggesting is that we've advanced.

We cannot let the right wing roll back more than thirty years of social progress.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...

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.

The progress of the world through all its evils making it fit for the ideals, slowly but surely.

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.

Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.

Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.

One day. my kids are gonna be like, 'What do you mean, gay people couldn't get married?' Just like most of my friends are black, and I find it hard to believe that my great-grandmother and even my grandmother couldn't hang out with black kids when they were young.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.