Julian Huxley - Science Quotes

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Thanks to science, the under-privileged are coming to believe that no one need be underfed or chronically diseased, or deprived of the benefits of its technical and practical applications.
The world's unrest is largely due to this new belief. People are determined not to put up with a subnormal standard of physical health and material living now that science has revealed the possibility of raising it. The unrest will produce some unpleasant consequences before it is dissipated; but it is in essence a beneficent unrest, a dynamic force which will not be stilled until it has laid the physiological foundations of human destiny.

Julian Huxley
We are already justified in the conviction that human life as we know it in history is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance; and that it could be transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension, just as our modern control of physical nature based on science transcends the tentative fumblings of our ancestors, that were rooted in superstition and professional secrecy.
To do this, we must study the possibilities of creating a more favourable social environment, as we have already done in large measure with our physical environment.

Julian Huxley
The entire cosmos is made out of one and the same world-stuff, operated by the same energy as we ourselves. "Mind" and "matter" appears as two aspects of our unitary mind-bodies. There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion; they are both organs of evolving humanity.

Julian Huxley
Without the impersonal guidance and the efficient control provided by science civilization will either stagnate or collapse, and human nature cannot make progress towards realizing its possible evolutionary destiny.

Julian Huxley
The attempt to understand this universe, including the nature of man, is the task of science; and as she makes progress with this task, so will she become more and more an indispensable part of philosophy and religion — imagination's touchstone, thought's background, action's base.

Julian Huxley
Like the meridians as they approach the poles, science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole. I say "converge" advisedly, but without merging, and without ceasing, to the very end, to assail the real from different angles and on different planes.

Julian Huxley
It is no longer possible to maintain that science and religion must operate in thought-tight compartments or concern separate sectors of life; they are both relevant to the whole of human existence.

Julian Huxley
Science... has not only turned her face outwards from man, but stripped him of all the robes of his divinity, turned him out of the palace that he had so laboriously built in the center of the world, and left him in rags, pitiably insignificant and suddenly transported to an outlying corner of the cosmos.

Julian Huxley
Modem civilisation rests upon physical science; take away her gifts to our own country, and our position among the leading nations of the world is gone to-morrow; for it is physical science only that makes intelligence and moral energy stronger than brute force.

Julian Huxley
Science has two main functions in civilization. One is to give man a picture of the world phenomena, the most accurate and complete picture possible. The other is to provide him with the means of controlling his environment and his destiny.

Julian Huxley
Imagination is needed in science as much as in any other mental activity. But it must not take charge of the scientific mind. If it [were to] do, disaster may follow.

Julian Huxley
Science, like Empires, have their rise and their time of flourishing, though not their decay.

Julian Huxley
The time has gone by when the intelligent public needs to be reminded of the practical utility of science, or of the fact that the investigation of any problem, however apparently remote from everyday life, may be fraught with the most valuable consequences.

Julian Huxley