Цитаты из книги «Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science»

Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who led the chosen people into the land

the belief that men were merely monkeys who had lost their tails, presumably by sitting upon them.

The evolutionary principles had never been put into a single big book, asked for at Mudie's, and permitted to lie on the drawing-room table side by side with the last new novel and the last fat volume of scandalous court memoirs.

Kant and Laplace had worked out the development of suns and earths from white-hot star-clouds. Lyell had worked out the evolution of the earth's surface to its present highly complex geographical condition. Lamarck had worked out the descent of plants and animals from a common ancestor by slow modification. Herbert Spencer had worked out the growth of mind from its simplest beginnings to its highest outcome in human thought.

Mr. Darwin did not invent evolution any more than George Stephenson invented the steam-engine, or Mr. Edison the electric telegraph. We are not descended from men with tails, any more than we are descended from Indian elephants. There is no evidence that we have anything in particular more than the remotest fiftieth cousinship with our poor relation the West African gorilla. Science is not in search of a 'missing link'; few links are anywhere missing, and those are for the most part wholly unimportant ones

Everybody believes he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen, the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of authors he has never read.

Everybody nowadays talks about evolution. Like electricity, the cholera germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question, it is 'in the air.'

the Greeks refused to use the true old Greek word for left at all, and preferred euphemistically to describe it as seems equally to mean the hand that is left after the right has been mentioned, or, in short, the other one.

Adult man is the only animal who, in the familiar scriptural phrase, 'knoweth the right hand from the left.' This fact in his economy goes closely together with the other facts, that he is the only animal on this sublunary planet who habitually uses a knife and fork, articulate language, the art of cookery, the common pump, and the musical glasses.

I like my science and my champagne as dry as I can get them.