Charles Darwin

The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.

We are like a judge who has to sum up and deliver judgment, not on the evidence of witnesses, but on the arguments of counsel.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men.

I have tried to be a good boy, and I have done my best.

It is always best to be a little under rather than over the mark.

As a proof of the admirable power of the mind, I may mention that I have been for some years training my mind to reject the evidence of my senses when they do not square with my preconceived notions.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.

I have felt a considerable reluctance to express myself in this chapter on the subject of religion.

He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out generalizations.

Man has risen to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, is the best proof of his power of development.

I have always felt a strong feeling of gratitude to those who have helped me in my work.

Ultimately, the universe must be the outcome of chance.

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.