Zitat des Tages von Thomas Huxley:
I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.
If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.
Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.
The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.
I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.
The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand.
It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.
Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.
Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.
My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.
The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Learn what is true in order to do what is right.
All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.
