“Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.”

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

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.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them… Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

If people know we expect good things from them, they will in most cases go to great lengths to live up to our expectations.

I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.

You can always tell the Catholic schools by the length of the cheerleaders’ skirts.

Every time you think a thought it ‘registers’, and comes back to you according to the vibrations and wave lengths sent out from your mind.

There’s no need to explain anything at length. Let go of love and hate and let things be. That’s all that I do in my own practice.

Sleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies.

Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.