The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we’ve made. That’s the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

I’ve definitely seen bands before they made money kind of change their thing on the next tour, and I prefer it when it’s a little more raw.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they’ve had forever. And they’ve been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn’t work today.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as ‚evolver,‘ is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

I fell and broke my pelvic bone in three places. So, I’m still sort of an invalid now.

Everything has changed, and nothing has changed more than the world of fashion.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

Eventually, all companies are replaced.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.