Evolution Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual.… Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.

I also often hear the word 'evolution'. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression

Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the invisible king-the élan vital-the principle of evolution... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The nineteenth century which prides itself upon the invention of steam and evolution, might have derived a more legitimate title to fame from the discovery of pure mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

Cow protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in the human evolution.

A selfish basis would not serve the purpose of taking a man higher and higher along the paths of evolution.

Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person.

Pope John Paul II

Mr. Darwin begs me to say that he receives so many letters that he cannot answer them all. He considers that the theory of evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God; but that you must remember that different persons have different definitions of what they mean by God.

In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements.

Something deep down in me seems to furnish me with the belief that Providence has destined India to be the laboratory in which the greatest experiment of cultural synthesis will be undertaken and successfully completed. India's mission in the world history seems to be evolution of a distinct type of humanity, combining and harmonizing in itself lives of the diverse types which history has produced, all blended together to form a new type that might evolve a characteristic and, perhaps, more satisfactory patterns of civilized existence than those in vogue at present.

Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.

Natalie Clifford Barney

The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

Gary L. Francione

The most notable difference (of the American character) lies in the psychology of work. In the Orient one works to live; in Europe one works to consume; in America one works to work. These are the three stages of a progressive evolution.

It is man's pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."

Jean-Jacques Nattiez

I believe that God left certain drugs growing naturally upon our planet to help speed up and facilitate our evolution.

The recent discoveries that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional severely undercut the social scientists' official view of the world because they establish that genetics may have played a possible substantial role alongside culture in shaping the differences between human populations.

The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature. Just as, when we attempt to verify any physical law, we find our observations cannot be precisely satisfied by it, and rightly attribute the discrepancy to errors of observation, so we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owing to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Evolution is nothing but
a long string of false steps;
and it may happen that a severed head
will sing.

It is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self — for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible. Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

Buckminster Fuller

The Admiralty sent the Beagle to South America with Darwin on board not because they were interested in evolution but because they knew that the first step to understanding (and, with luck, controlling) the world was to make a map of it. The same is true of the genes.

Steve Jones (biologist)

A statute of 1344 shows some weakness; but the statute of 1391 is memorable, not merely as being the Mortmain Code of three centuries, but as extending the rule of mortmain to all bodies, religious and secular alike, having perpetual succession. For this extension marks the definite recognition by English Law of the corporation, or, as it is sometimes called, the 'fictitious person' - the legal personality which is not restricted to the limits of individual life. The gradual evolution of this institution is one of the most fascinating chapters in legal history...

Pain by itself is merely pain,
but the experience of pain couples with an understanding
that the pain serves a worthy purpose as suffering.
Suffering can be endured because
there is a reason for it that is worth the effort.
What is more worthy of your pain than the evolution of your soul?

Although it may be extremely reasonable (especially from our present vantage point) to conclude that some part of human evolution, if not aspects of the diversification of hominoids in general, is indeed preserved in the fossil record of Africa, this does not in and of itself lead inexorably to the conclusion that humans and African apes are closely related.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz

Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again.
But it had nothing to do with mankind.