Evolution Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The main object of astronomy, as of all science, is not the collection of facts, but the development, on the basis of collected facts, of satisfactory theories regarding the nature, mutual relations, and probable history and evolution of the objects of study.

Henry Norris Russell

The great questions of zoology are the what and the how of evolution.

A human body is associated with six stages of transformation, birth, growth, change, evolution, death and destruction.

Sathya Sai Baba

A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind.

Lewis H. Morgan

A nation is born into freedom on the day when such a people, moulded into a nation by a process of cultural evolution and sense of oneness born of common struggle and suffering, announces to the world that it asserts its natural right to liberty and is ready to defend it with blood, life, and honor.

Diosdado Macapagal

Our children take our level of vibration and raise it even higher. This is how we, as humans, continue evolution.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

I'll tell you what I think. I think sages are the growing tip of the secret impulse of evolution. I think they are the leading edge of the self-transcending drive that always goes beyond what went before. I think they embody the very drive of the Kosmos toward greater depth and expanding consciousness. I think they are riding the edge of a light beam toward a rendezvous with God.

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).

Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution is a quirky take of old structures pressed and altered to new functions.

Stephen Jay Gould

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

For the scientific materialist the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might therefore more accurately term them "materialists employing science." And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence.

I see nothing in the theory of evolution inconsistent with an Almighty Creator and Protector.

John Henry Newman

Masonry is too great an institution to have been made in a day, much less by a few men, but was a slow evolution through long time, unfolding its beauty as it grew. Indeed, it was like one of its own cathedrals which one generation of builders wrought and vanished, and another followed, until, amidst vicissitudes of time and change, of decline and revival, the order itself became a temple of Freedom and Fraternity.

Joseph Fort Newton

The evolution of life on earth, or of human society, is a unique historical process. [From such] a process, we may assume, for example, the laws of mechanics, of chemistry, of heredity and segregation, of natural selection, etc. Its description, however, is not a law but only a singular historical statement.

Human beings are born and begin their evolution through the great spiral of consciousness, moving from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to perhaps integral, and from there perhaps into genuinely transpersonal domains. But for every person that moves into integral or higher, dozens are born into the archaic.

The brain is the great factory of thought. To it are directed all the forces of nature, forces which, for thousands of years, have been expending themselves upon it and impressing on it a slow and continuous motion of evolution.

Leonardo Bianchi

Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God.

A paleontologist holds the thread of evolution in his hands by combining the biological and geological evidence in fossils.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

It is your soul's journey to enroll the ego in the quest for the ultimate victory - the evolution of your own individual consciousness.

Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask if God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.

J. B. S. Haldane

Sediments between 4 and 10 million years in age are potential guardians of the Holy Grail of human evolution — the period when our lineage began its separate end run to later domination, and a time for which no fossil evidence exists at all.

Stephen Jay Gould

A crystal and a cell, A jelly fish and a saurian And caves where cavemen dwell. Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod. Some call it evolution And others call it God.

Robert Andrews Millikan

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

If God is a synonym for the deepest principles of physics, what word is left for a hypothetical being who answers prayers, intervenes to save cancer patients or helps evolution over difficult jumps, forgives sins or dies for them? Snake Oil and Holy Water

Richard Dawkins