Quotes from Thomas Huxley

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.

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.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

God give me the strength to face a fact though it slay me.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

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.

Science is simply common sense at its best.

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.