Charles Darwin quotes and sayings

Charles Darwin quotes and links to Charles Darwin quotes. 

Quotes by Darwin are interlaced with quotes by prestigious followers about Darwin or his theories.

""Without speculation there is no good & original observation." - Charles Darwin

"It awes me. If you be right I must give up much that I have believed." - Reverend Charles Kingsley on receiving a copy of the Origin of Species.

"Animals may partake from our common origin in one ancestor... we may all be melted together." - Charles Darwin, notebook.

"If I could give an award for the best single idea anybody ever had, I would give it to Darwin, because his idea unifies the meaningless, mechanical physical sciences, and the world of meaning, culture, art and biology." - Daniel Dennett

"Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." - Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.

"It is hard to believe that anybody did not think of [evolution by means of natural selection] before, and yet nobody did, not really" - Richard Dawkins.

"Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." - Charles Darwin, Descent of Man 

"Say there is a population of ordinary elephants in Siberia when it is warm and then the ice age starts. There is natural variation in the amount of hair of those elephants ... [some] will do better and have more offspring and a hundred generations down the line you get a woolly mammoth." - Stephen Jay Gould.

"Children ... constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one--object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow--Home and someone to take care of house--charms of music and female chit-chat...good for one's health--but terrible loss of time. My God it is intolerable to think of spending one's whole life like a neuter bee working, working and nothing after all... Marry, marry, marry." - Charles Darwin on the advantages of marriage.

"Your leading idea [natural selection] will assuredly become recognised as an established truth in science." - Henry Watson, botanist, on receiving a copy of the Origin of Species.

“The dearest, sweetest, loveliest old grandpa that ever was.” - John Fiske about Darwin.