“An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

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!