Evolution Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Every nursing mother, in the midst of her little dependent brood, has far more right to whine, sulk or scold, as temperament dictates, because beefsteak and coffee are not prepared for her and exactly to her taste, than any man ever had or ever can have during the present stage of human evolution.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Slowly, but surely, evolution brings about an increasing amount of happiness; all evils being but incidental.

Herbert Spencer

If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important.... It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.

Today, the Indian government is trying to present privatization as the alternative to the state, to public enterprise. But privatization is only a further evolution of the centralized state, where the state says that they have the right to give the entire power production in Maharashtra to Enron.

For a few moments, be aware of your potential for change. Whatever your present situation is, evolution and transformation are always possible. At the least, you can change your way of seeing things and then, gradually, your way of being as well.

Matthieu Ricard

The assumption that technical civilizations must necessarily make an appearance, even after many billions of years of biological evolution, implies that the ultimate purpose, or goal, in the formation of stars and planets is the production of intelligent beings and technical civilizations - an idealistic and teleological view.

All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.

William Jennings Bryan

I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." It's there, we just forget.

Terry Tempest Williams

We must only learn that independence cannot be gained by a rebellion against the constitution of the universe, or by inverting the laws of life and evolution, but by comprehending them and adapting ourselves to the world in which we live.

What the activity of this disposition of ours means in the evolution of the world, we do not know. Nor can we regulate this activity from outside; we must leave entirely to each individual
its shaping and its extension. From every point of view, then, world- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational, and we must have the courage to admit it.

Albert Schweitzer

Evolution is a change from a nohowish untalkaboutable all-alikeness, to a somehowish and in-general-talkaboutable not-all-alikeness, by continuous somethingelseifications and sticktogetherations.

Why did it take so long for evolution to be seriously proposed? And why did Darwinism face such an uphill battle after it was proposed? The reason is that Darwin challenged some of the basic beliefs of his age. Four of them were pillars of Christina dogma.

The fact is that our knowledge of the universe has been in the nature of a slow and gradual evolution, commencing at a very early period in human history, and destined to go forward without stop, as we hope, so long as civilization shall endure.

To suppose that the evolution of the wonderfully adapted biological mechanisms has depended only on a selection out of a haphazard set of variations, each produced by blind chance, is like suggesting that if we went on throwing bricks together into heaps, we should eventually be able to choose ourselves the most desirable house.

C. H. Waddington

The process of evolution on this earth, so far as we can judge, has been carried out neither with intelligence nor truth, but entirely through the routine of various sequences, commonly called "laws," established or necessitated we know not how.

A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution.

In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudices, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record.

The evolution of knowledge is toward simplicity, not complexity.

The laws of chance have rendered, and will continue to render, immense services to science. It is inconceivable that we could do without them, but they only express an admirable, subjective interpretation of certain inorganic phenomena and of their evolution. They are not a true explanation of objective reality.

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy

I regard the failure to find a clear "vector of progress" in life's history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record. But I also believe we are now on the verge of a solution, thanks to a better understanding of evolution in both normal and catastrophic times.

Stephen Jay Gould

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

Kevin Kelly (editor)

Perhaps the most majestic feature of our whole existence is that while our intelligences are powerful enough to penetrate deeply into the evolution of this quite incredible Universe, we still have not the smallest clue to our own fate.

The stately drama of stellar evolution turns out to be more like the hair-breadth escapades of the films. The music of the spheres has almost a suggestion of—jazz.

Arthur Eddington

The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human conciousness... seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature.

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

William Irwin Thompson