Which Famous Quotes Are Attributed To Darwin'S Bulldog?

I bookmark quotes. This list will include quotes that you can use as your profile pic. Yes, that easy. Huxley is one of my favorite authors. The following quotes have been collected for you to use as you see fit. Some of the quotes are direct pulls from his writing while others are merely paraphrased and included in various quote compilations. I have included my thoughts as to whether a quote is a direct pull or not after each quote.

Huxley: "The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." A great line to pull out during debate, for it encapsulates Huxley’s view wonderfully. The other quote listed above is similarly sound for use as it constitutes a perfect rebuttal to someone who confuses science with mere opinion. That it comes from Huxley’s essays and lectures rather than from some insubstantial online quote book makes it that much better to use.

A lot of these quotes float around, including this: 'Try to learn something about everything and everything about something'. It looks and reads well enough to have been printed on the cover of a paperback or included in a set of lectures notes on Victorian literature, and I’ve certainly seen it attributed to Huxley in such contexts. Another favourite of skeptics is the section which describes the parasitic wasp in exacting detail and then uses this as a basis to discuss the problems of suffering in nature and religion. Again, the sentiment is true to form for Huxley, but as ever the catchiest phrases and most evocative imagery are prone to being somewhat amplified in quotation. As before, another good quote that is often attributed to Huxley is: 'It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions'. Again, I suspect this to be a rather condensed version of a longer quote or passage.

In terms of pasting to a profile, or to create a banner, it’s probably best to stick with the two quoted at the top. For a list of “things that Huxley could have said”, it’s generally okay to use these really nice-sounding paraphrases, provided you acknowledge the uncertainty somewhere. (As I said, I love these quotes for lots of reasons, not least that they force me to adopt a healthy skepticism to pretty ideas – a commodity in short supply.)

A lot of the classic literature is dog-eared on my bookshelves, along with many of the lectures in printed form. Thus, the quotes of Huxley seem very familiar to me. For people who are not familiar with Huxley, it is often very hard to tell which quotes really are from Darwin’s Bulldog and which have only been attributed to him as part of popular paraphrase.

For quotes which are reliably sourced to Huxley, we have two good quotes to work with, both written by him concerning the method and spirit of Science. One of his more famous quotes concerning Science is: ‘Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation and merciless to fallacy in logic.’ This and the following quote are reliable, having been cited numerous times in many essays on Huxley. They make for great quotes, and in many cases these two quotes are what people are looking for in terms of a Huxley quote. The following quote is also reliably sourced to Huxley in his essays, and is a famous quote among many in the scientific community. It reads: ‘The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.’

Other quotes which have been attributed to Huxley are “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something”, and they make sense insofar as they could have been written by anyone trying to sell education to the Victorians. While it is true that Huxley said a few words about Ichneumonid wasps in his essays on Science and the Beginnings of Humanity, other vivid comments on the same subject have been invented for the purposes of clerical (or apocryphal) debate – and sometimes these have been further sensationalized in later retellings. As always with Huxley, the real meat is to be found in his essays, particularly his famous debates with the clergy, and here it is sometimes difficult to separate out fact from fiction, especially as he occasionally conflated these with his famous and rather grueling exchange with Bishop Wilberforce.

Cite your use of the first two quotes from Huxley’s popular collections (‘Lay Sermons’ and ‘Collected Essays’), and describe the other quotes in this set of dog-eared papier as having been ‘paraphrased’ for your readers. You might, when talking to students, point out that these pithy quotes should serve to whet their curiosity about the scientific individual behind them — and then refer to the longer, more well-developed essays where the real intellectual fire-power lies. These, and a host of related themes and arguments (on the nature of evidence; on ethics) are as timely and contentious today as they were during Huxley’s own, much-disputed lifetime.

A pithy quote by Huxley? Love it. If you’ve seen quotes from Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” in quote collections, you know that some of the short quotes from him are indelibly printed in one’s brain. I have finally gotten around to compiling a list of the most-often found quotes from him with relevant background information because he was a man of detail and I am a man of detail too (except when I am watching an inordinate amount of anime).

The poster-worthy line of Huxley’s is probably: “The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” This one captures Huxley’s pragmatic appreciation for beautiful theories and his recognition that in the end, facts rule. Also frequently found on science class posters is this wonderful summation of the scientific method: “Science is simply common sense at its best — that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.” This is roughly how Huxley characterized the process of science in various essays on the subject.

You also find these quotes quite often: “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” Or: “The man who grasps principles can successfully handle details.” And: “Science is merely organized common sense; its special tool is the explosion of English common-sense conversation into mathematics and the collection of data through observation.” And: “As long as our intellect develops primordially through experience, as long as we think with our limbs, knowledge will remain fragmentary and arbitrary.” And a few more, like: “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions.” I mentioned these, as they are original to Huxley’s essays and lectures. As with the longer quote above, these ‘bite-sized’ quotes have been transformed into snappy aphorisms for us to remember.

In a slightly longer quote, he mused on the history of new ideas saying, "It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions." Then there are a couple more quotes. Firstly, that a man "who grasps principles can successfully handle details" – spot on, as ever. And, a little more negative, "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something" – I actually quite like this one though.

The vagaries of exact wording are rather enjoyable, especially in the context of famous quotes. So long as you use the best quotes for the purpose at hand (e.g., blog posts, debate club), you could always add a note or two about the sources for said quotes, which would then reveal the quote-wielder to be someone who not only likes famous quotes, but also actually researched the quotes he or she used. My favorite quote to live by would probably be the “beautiful hypothesis” line. It has saved me from believing far too many very plausible-sounding but ultimately false ideas.