“We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered.”
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Thomas Henry Huxley 127
English biologist and comparative anatomist 1825–1895Related quotes
Hermann Bondi, Assumption and Myth in Physical Theory, (1967) p. 11

Source: 1900s, A History of the American People, Vol. 9 (1902), p. 82

“In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.”
Source: To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (1618), Lines 55 - 70
Context: Yet must I not give nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion. And that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine arc) and strike the second heat
Upon the muses anvil; turn the fame,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet's made, as well as born.
And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakspeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true filed lines:
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.
Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 12
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Original text: [...] si l'on y rencontre moins d'éclat qu'au sein d'une aristocratie, on y trouvera moins de misères; les jouissances y seront moins extrêmes, et le bien-être plus général; les sciences moins grandes, et l'ignorance plus rare; les sentiments moins énergiques, et les habitudes plus douces; on y remarquera plus de vices et moins de crimes.
Introduction.
Democracy in America, Volume I (1835)

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 8 (at page 63)

Mario Bunge, Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction, 2001, p. 20.
2000s