“Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred.”

—  John Burroughs

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. X: Religious Truth

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eightee…" by John Burroughs?
John Burroughs photo
John Burroughs41
American naturalist and essayist 1837–1921

Related quotes

Kent Hovind photo

“Many believe that more Christians have already been killed in the last one hundred years than in the previous nineteen hundred years!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 51

Voltaire photo

“Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Où est le prince assez instruit pour savoir que depuis dix-sept cents ans la secte chrétienne n’a jamais fait que du mal? <br class="br">Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano&#x27;s, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 160 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 6 April 1767 http://perso.orange.fr/dboudin/VOLTAIRE/45/1767/6824.html <br class="br">Citas

“More than one hundred years ago, William Bateson suggested that studying the regulation and timing of development was the key to understanding evolutionary change. He was right.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

p, 125
Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)

Spider Robinson photo

“It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

God Is An Iron (1977)
Context: "It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand? That lemming drive you're talking about is there — but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and—" She paused, looked down at herself. "And I wouldn't be here to say them."

Henry David Thoreau photo

“For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?”

Henry David Thoreau book Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience (1849)

“The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)
Context: Faced by the dire nihilism of our time, we need a greater honesty... The Western search for unifying truth did not come to an end with Christianity, any more than with the physical theories of forty years ago.

Stanislaw Ulam photo

“With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 5, Harvard Years, p. 91

“No culture has ever exceeded Western civilization in power and extent. Our society now covers more than half of the globe, extending in space from Poland to the east of Australia i n the west. In the course of this expansion, most of it during the last five centuries, the power of Western civilization has been so great that it has destroyed, almost without thinking of it, hundreds of other societies, including five or six other civilizations.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 10, Western Civilization, p. 334

Madonna photo

“Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as sheep.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna: 50 Years Of Wit And Wisdom, The Insider http://www.theinsider.com/news/1130430_Madonna_50_Years_Of_Wit_And_Wisdom,

Bernard Cornwell photo

“"We asked for them in February. It's June now; they must be coming." "They've been saying that about Christ for eighteen hundred years."”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Major Richard Sharpe and Major General Nairn
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Regiment (1986)

Related topics