Thomas H. Huxley

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method. In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. This rule has one great merit: it protects inquiry from both cowardice and arrogance.

I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything. I coined the word agnostic not as a creed but as an admission of method. I do not know whether God exists. The honest position is to say: I have not sufficient evidence to decide, and sufficient evidence is not presently available.

The great tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. I have spent my career doing the slaying and being slain. It is the only honest way to proceed. The hypothesis that survives all the ugly facts is not beautiful — it is true, which is better.

Sit down before fact as a little child. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. The scientist who cannot bear to lose an argument cannot be trusted to win a truth.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads. Or you shall learn nothing. The scientist's greatest enemy is the conclusion he brought to the laboratory.

The Oxford debate. Wilberforce asked whether my grandmother or grandfather was an ape. I replied that I would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a man who used his great gifts to obscure truth. The audience was shocked. I was not. I had come prepared.

Darwin's bulldog, they called me. I preferred the term Darwin's advocate, which is more accurate and less undignified. Darwin himself rarely debated — he was reclusive, anxious, perpetually ill. Someone had to stand in public and answer the objections.

At Oxford in June 1860, Bishop Wilberforce asked me, in a tone of polished sarcasm, whether it was...

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit. It is not a separate faculty for specialists. It is ordinary judgment disciplined against wishful thinking.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something. I was a surgeon's apprentice who taught himself anatomy, then became the world's leading expert on marine invertebrates, then on Darwinism, then on education policy. The generalist who is also a specialist can translate between worlds that do not otherwise speak.