“It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which, as the earthly wants and the passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark of history.”

The Study of History (1895)

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton112

British politician and historian 1834–1902

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“The great gain would be freedom of thought. Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered.”

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“Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.”

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“Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

“It is difficult to pronounce on the opinion of the ministers of our Church as a body: one portion of them, by far the least informed, protests against anything which can advance the honour and the interests of science, because, in their limited and mistaken view, science is adverse to religion. This is not the place to argue that great question. It is sufficient to remark, that the best-informed and most enlightened men of all creeds and pursuits, agree that truth can never damage truth, and that every truth is allied indissolubly by chains more or less circuitous with all other truths; whilst error, at every step we make in its diffusion, becomes not only wider apart and more discordant from all truths, but has also the additional chance of destruction from all rival errors.”

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Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 225

“The studious and good and true, never suffer their minds to be warped by the passions of hatred and envy, which unfit men duly to weigh the arguments that are advanced in behalf of truth, or to appreciate the proposition that is even fairly demonstrated. Neither do they think it unworthy of them to change their opinion if truth and undoubted demonstration require them to do so. They do not esteem it discreditable to desert error, though sanctioned by the highest antiquity, for they know full well that to err, to be deceived, is human; that many things are discovered by accident and that many may be learned indifferently from any quarter, by an old man from a youth, by a person of understanding from one of inferior capacity.”

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“Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

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“To write history is as important as to make history. If the writer does not remain true to the maker, then the unchanging truth takes on a quality that will confuse the humanity.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

Original: Tarih yazmak, tarih yapmak kadar mühimdir. Yazan yapana sadık kalmazsa değişmeyen hakikat, insanlığı şaşırtacak bir mahiyet alır. <br class="br">Source: As quoted by Hasan Cemil Çambel in T.T.K. Belleten (1939), Vol: 3, no: 10, p. 272, Turkish Republic Ministry of Culture http://www.kultur.gov.tr/TR,25417/tarih.html

“The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority, are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior, who will not begin with being inferior.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

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Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)

“The study of truth requires a considerable effort - which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge - despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.”

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Source: Summa Contra Gentiles

“Let us labor for that larger and larger comprehension of truth, that more and more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

Thoughts (1867), p. 240

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton112

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