Thomas Huxley Quotes

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.

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 human race has improved everything, but the human race.

In general, the human race is still a young organism.

What more powerful form of study of mankind could there be than to read our own instruction book?

Since the cosmic process of evolution is amoral, there is no guarantee that good will win out over evil, that human society will thrive rather than fail.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

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

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.

We've gotten through a lot of tough times, and we're going to keep working to make them better. I wish the record was better.

Ever since we invented fire and the wheel, we've been demonstrating both our ability and our inherent desire to fix things that we don't like about ourselves and our environment.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

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

Many people, whether religious believers or not, were repelled by the idea that we humans are nothing more special than a species of mammal directly descended from the higher primates, and that we achieved that status by winning a long struggle, shockingly red, as Tennyson famously put it, “in tooth and claw

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.

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.

My fear is that in general terms the evolution of the political process proceeds at the same pace as the evolution of the species and I do not myself believe that that is quite fast enough

History is the zoology of the human race.

With highly civilized nations, continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. Nevertheless the more intelligent members within the same community will succeed better in the long run than the inferior, and leave a more numerous progeny, and this is a form of natural selection.

Three ideas stand out above all others in the influence they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race: The idea of the Golden Rule, the idea of natural law, and the idea of age-long growth, or evolution.

One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigor of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.