Quotes about evolution

Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.

— Jean Baudrillard

Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world... life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

— Edward Conklin

The question is this -- Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new fanged theories.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.

— Havelock Ellis

Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.

— W. S. Gilbert

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed -- that is the meaning of evolution.

— Graham Greene

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

— Eric Hoffer

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

— Konrad Lorenz

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

— H. L. Mencken

Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.

— John Morley

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

— Malcolm Muggeridge

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

— Charles Sanders Peirce

We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act.

— W. Winwood Reade

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

— Bertrand Russell

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.

— Bertrand Russell

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

— Cornelia Otis Skinner

The more specific idea of Evolution now reached is -- a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.

— Herbert Spencer

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces -- in nature, in society, in man himself.

— Leon Trotsky

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

— Mark Twain

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

— Mark Twain

After listening to a lecture on evolution by a science professor, a student wrote a poem and titled it The Amazing Professor. The poem read: Once I was a tadpole when I began to begin. Then I was a frog with my tail tucked in. Next I was a monkey on a coconut tree. Now I am a doctor with a Ph.D.

— Source Unknown

Evolution has developed man to such a high degree that he builds zoos to keep his ancestors in cages.

— Source Unknown

Two million years from now the scientists can start a row by claming that the creatures of that period descended from us.

— Source Unknown

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

— George Wald

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

— H.G. Wells

The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

— John Adams

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

— John Adams

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

— Hannah Arendt

In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.

— Aristotle

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.

— Aristotle

Thinkers prepare the revolution and bandits carry it out.

— Mariano Azuela

Revolution begins with the self, in the self.

— Toni Cade Bambara

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

— Ambrose Bierce

So they united, and the Communist revolution took the chain from their legs and wound it around their necks.

— Samuel Bonom

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.

— John Mason Brown

Men are made uneasy; they flinch; they cannot bear the sudden light; a general restlessness supervenes; the face of society is disturbed, or perhaps convulsed; old interests and old beliefs have been destroyed before new ones have been created. These symptoms are the precursors of revolution; they have preceded all the great changes through which the world has passed.

— Henry Thomas Buckle

I had such a wonderful feeling last night, walking beneath the dark sky while cannon boomed on my right and guns on my left the feeling that I could change the world only by being there.

— Viorica Butnariu

The dead have been awakened -- shall I sleep? The world's at war with tyrants -- shall I crouch? the harvest's ripe -- and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, its echo in my heart.

— Lord Byron

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

— Albert Camus

Every revolutionary ends up by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

— Albert Camus

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

— Albert Camus

A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.

— Fidel Castro

I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

— Fidel Castro

I began revolution with 82 men. If I had [To] do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

— Fidel Castro

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement -- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

— Joseph Conrad

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.

— Joseph Conrad

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

— Camille Desmoulins

Our cause is just. Our union is perfect.

— John Dickinson

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

— Denis Diderot

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

— Milovan Djilas

Plots, true or false, are necessary things, to raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.

— John Dryden

Every revolution was first a thought in one man?s mind.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be a revolutionary you have to be human being. You have to care about people who have no power.

— Jane Fonda

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

— Charles James Fox

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

— Erich Fromm

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

— Jean Genet

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

— Germaine Greer

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.

— Francois (Pierre Guillaume) Guizot

When people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything for their victory, but new masters.

— Edward F. Halifax

True revolutionaries are like God -- they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.

— Heinrich Heine

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

— Alexander Herzen

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.

— Eric Hoffer

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

— Eric Hoffer

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.

— Abbie Hoffman

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.

— Richard Hooker

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

— Victor Hugo

If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.

— Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren't started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better -- and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts -- it's what you do with what you have left.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

— Henrik Ibsen

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.

— Dean William R. Inge

Revolutions are notorious for allowing even non-participants -- even women! -- new scope for telling the truth since they are themselves such massive moments of truth, moments of such massive participation.

— Selma James

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

— Thomas Jefferson

And then, Sir, there is this consideration, that if the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

— Samuel Johnson

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

— Franz Kafka

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

— John F. Kennedy

Revolutions are not made for export.

— Nikita Khrushchev

The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

Riots are the voices of the unheard.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

In this Revolution no plans have been written for retreat.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

You cannot make a revolution in white gloves.

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a revolutionary review, or read a revolutionary speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly revolutionary. What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

— Wyndham Lewis

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.

— Wyndham Lewis

At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.

— Karl Liebknecht

It is easier to run a revolution than a government.

— Ferdinand E. Marcos

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose, but their chains. .Workers of the world unite!

— Karl Marx

In every revolution there intrude, at the side of its true agents, men of a different stamp; some of them survivors of and devotees to past revolutions, without insight into the present movement, but preserving popular influence by their known honesty and courage, or by the sheer force of tradition; others mere brawlers, who, by dint of repeating year after year the same set of stereotyped declamations against the government of the day, have sneaked into the reputation of revolutionists of the first water They are an unavoidable evil: with time they are shaken off.

— Karl Marx

Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought.

— Kwame Nkrumah