The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
— Thomas Huxley
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.
Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.
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.
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
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.
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 results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
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 ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
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.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
Learn what is true in order to do what is right.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
