“We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.”

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.

Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

I am not the least afraid to die.

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. To group all facts under some general laws.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult, at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

Only the fittest will survive.

The loss of tastes for poetry and music is a loss of happiness.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives – of approving of some and disapproving of others.

Sometimes the smallest details about a person are the biggest reasons why you love them.

Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all overthe place for no sensible reason.

Always keep the big picture in mind- you are greatly loved by Jesus and your job is to love Him and others in return. The rest is detail.

I don’t want to get too detailed into it, but when you’re a good high school running back, you can almost be whatever type of runner you want to be. If you’re a good size and a good athlete, you can be whatever type of runner you want.

In the appendix to my History of the Russian Revolution I give a detailed and documented study of the ideas of the Bolshevik party on the October revolution. This study, I hope, will make it impossible in the future to ascribe to [Vladimir] Lenin the theory of Socialism in a single country.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Some pain shouldn’t be wished away so easily. It has to be dealt with, even embraced.

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.