Quotes about evolution
page 11

“The task of unveiling the hidden truth demands some knowledge of Cosmogenesis, of the emanation of the Universe from the Absolute, the finite from the Infinite, and of the successive cycles, major and minor, of involution and evolution. In addition, both knowledge of the Symbolical Language, its purposes, methods and classical symbols, and the faculty of analysing and interpreting historical metaphors, are necessary to open the casket containing the treasures of concealed wisdom—the Holy Bible itself.”

Geoffrey Hodson (1886–1983) New Zealand occultist

Source: The Hidden Wisdom In The Holy Bible (1963)

Success, Knowledge, Truth, Universe

“All the numberless different solutions that evolution had come up with under all the different stars, and all responding—more or less—to the same pressures. Eyes on every world. Mouths near the sense organs, because things with feeding coordination did better than things without.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 34 (p. 359)

Sense, Star, World

“Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 29 (p. 309)

Past, Baby

“Think of life as being this book, an unfinished book for sure. We're just seeing the last few pages of each chapter. If you look out on the eight million species that we share this planet with, think of them all being four billion years of evolution. They're all the product of that. Think of us all as young leaves on this ancient and gigantic tree of life, all of us connected by invisible branches not just to each other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors. As a biologist, I'm still trying to learn, with others, how everyone's related to each other, who is related to whom. Perhaps it's better still to think of us as a little fish out of water. Yes, one that learned to walk and talk, but one that still has a lot of learning to do about who we are and where we came from.”

Prosanta Chakrabarty (1978) American ichthyologist

Source: Four billion years of evolution in six minutes https://www.ted.com/talks/prosanta_chakrabarty_four_billion_years_of_evolution_in_six_minutes (April 2018)

Tree, Learning, Water, Thinking

“Next, the facts are that there is a Path and that men have trodden it before us; that the swifter evolution is possible; that the laws of it may be known, the conditions of it understood, the stages of it be trodden; and that at the end of that Path there are standing Those Who once were men of the world, but now are the Guardians of the world, the Elder Brethren of our race, the Teachers and the Prophets of the past, stretching upwards in ranks of ever-more dazzling light from the ending of the Path for man to the highest Ruler of the world in which we live.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)

Law, Light, Past, Teachers

“Now, one of the great facts which underlie the whole possibility of a Path of Human Perfecting, that I must take for granted throughout the lectures — for to deal with it as a matter for argument would lead us far away from our subject — one of the fundamental facts in Nature, is the fact of reincarnation. That means the gradual growth of man through many lives, through many experiences of the physical world, of the intermediate world, and also of the world called heaven. Evolution would be too short to enable a man to grow from imperfection to perfection, unless he had many opportunities, a long, long road to lead him upward.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)

Perfection, World, Nature

“To know is the difference between walking in the darkness and in the light, and to understand the laws of Nature is to gain the power of quickening our evolution by utilizing every law that hastens our growth, by avoiding the working of those that would retard and delay.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Source: Initiation, The Perfecting of Man (1923)

Light, Law, Understanding, Nature

“True feeling doesn't program any moment or know time. Born from the heart, the only author of its evolution.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Il vero sentimento non programma alcun momento né conosce tempo. Nasce dal cuore, unico autore della sua evoluzione.
Source: prevale.net

Time, Feeling, Heart

“When one sees, the variety and abundance of beautiful and bloodless fruits that gorge the markets of civilisation and considers the amount of art available for cooking and compounding this abundance, and considers, too, what might be still further accomplished in the production and preparation of foods by scientific attention to the matter, it seems so strange, so sad, and so frightful, that man, elected by the accidents of evolution to be the model and schoolmaster of the world, and adapted so signally to a guiltless diet, should continue to perpetrate in the daylight of the twentieth century the barbarous, blood-sucking atrocities of the reptile.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Is Man a Plant-Eater?, p. 130

Food, Beauty, Art, World

“Another force driving progressive evolution is the so-called "arms-race."”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Prey animals evolve faster running speeds because predators do. Consequently predators have to evolve even faster running speeds, and so on, in an escalating spiral. Such arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech weaponry that animals display.
The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

“Evolution is a two-way street.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

Way

“Evolution’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“Holding something sacred stunts its evolution.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“Evolution doesn’t work on creationists.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens — not once in a trillion copings — but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents — things that almost never happen — and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents — which happens automatically when you have replication and competition — and you get evolution.
Breaking the Spell (2006)

“Spiritual evolution is the progressive advance of mankind toward a state of things in which the light of ethical perfection shall be reflected from the face of human society; that is, in which all men shall live and move and have their being in mutually promoting the highest life of each and all. It means that the object of social reformation shall not be a mere change in the conditions under which men live, but a change in human nature itself. It means that we shall look forward consciously to the breaking forth of new powers in ourselves, to the release, through our own efforts, of capacities dimly latent in us.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Some Characteristics of the American Ethical Movement (1925)

Perfection, Men, Light, Effort

“People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Some Principles of History", paragraph 106
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

People

“We need better establishment to allow interrelationships to protect us from too many contacts, but to allow us for those contacts which we do engage in to be more meaningful for our own lives, and for, meaningful to others in a compassionate sense of each of us being involved in helping the other to fulfill his role. We’ll have many more roles, and this is where the notion of compassion comes in, in helping, each of us helping others to fulfill their programs for development. And so, we’re at this peculiar stage where you’re highly optimistic, at the same time highly pessimistic, and you wish to throw your weight, intellectual weight, to moving towards the optimistic side, to opening up continuing evolution.”

John B. Calhoun (1917–1995) American ethologist and behavioral researcher

John B. Calhoun Film 7.1 https://medicineonscreen.nlm.nih.gov/transcripts-calhoun/ (1972)

Sense, Time, Help

“In the mysterious way in which life is given to us in evolution on this planet, it pushes in the direction of its own expansion. We don’t understand it simply because we don’t know the purpose of creation; we only feel life straining in ourselves and see it thrashing others about as they devour each other. Life seeks to expand in an unknown direction for unknown reasons.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?
The Denial of Death (1973)

Way, Life, Feeling, Understanding

“Unfortunately, instead of working out that they have probably misunderstood evolution, creationists conclude, instead, that evolution must be false.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Heat the Hornet https://www.nairaland.com/233071/heat-hornet-why-evolution-true (a review of Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True)

Falseness

“Suffice it to say that from the pure "gun" side of it, the Five-seveN is a fascinating design that deserves a place in modern gun collections, and which has written a fascinating and complex chapter in the evolution of modern handguns.”

Massad Ayoob (1948) American firearms and self-defence instructor

Defensive Handguns - The FN Five-seveN (2010)

“Death is not the end of life. It is an aspect of life. It is a natural incident in the course of life. It is necessary for your evolution.”

Aloysius Paul D'Souza (1941) Indian Roman Catholic Bishop

Death of Fr Patrick Rodrigues is ‘Nirvana’ – Bishop Aloysius D’Souza https://www.mangalorean.com/patrick-rodrigues-condolence/ (March 24, 2017)

Nature, Life, Death

“To the limits of my capabilities, I have tried to find a possibility of evolution as an answer to all life. But, it simply will not work without intelligent intervention.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

WotansVolk
Focus Fourteen

Intelligence, Life

“I... interpret mechanics as a theory of relations between variables, rather than the theory of the evolution of variables in time.”

Carlo Rovelli (1956) Italian physicist

"Forget time" (Aug, 2008)

Time

“Even the idea of evolution doesn’t explain nature— Simply, because it’s based on turning simplicity into complicated things.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Idea, Nature

“The fact that you came from a very beautiful worm demonstrate that, evolution is more romantic than scientific. Thus, it arouses the mind rather than illuminating it.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Beauty

“If you still thought evolution was about the good of the species, stop thinking so right now.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter X and Y “Conflict” (p. 113)

Thinking

“Human beings are of course unique. They have, perched between their ears, the most complicated biological machine on the planet. But complexity is not everything, and it is not the goal of evolution. Every species on the planet is unique. Uniqueness is a commodity in oversupply.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 2 “Species” (p. 25)

“The pope notwithstanding, the human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 2 “Species” (p. 24)

“The story of human evolution has progressed steadily from complete exclusiveness to an ever-broadening inclusiveness.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Introduction p. I - XII

“There are two ways of summing up world history, the inner way and the outer way. Both have been at the mercy of scribes and policies. Let us begin by realizing that the story of human evolution has progressed steadily from complete exclusiveness to an ever-broadening inclusiveness.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Introduction p. I - XII

History, World, Way

“The fundamental truth that makes us free is the grateful recognition that we come from God and we are not the product of chance, or of mere biological evolution, or of some cosmic coincidence.”

Andrés Stanovnik (1949) Catholic archbishop

Source: Bishop reminds Argentineans “man comes from God and is not product of chance” https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/4419/bishop-reminds-argentineans-man-comes-from-god-and-is-not-product-of-chance (17 July 2005)

God, Chance, Truth

“The human brain is evolution’s most magnificent disaster, a beautiful and glorious cesspool of brilliant analytical powers, infinite creativity, and pure madness.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

Beauty, Madness

“The dynamic earth has been spewing out the constituents of evolution and progress throughout its history, nurturing all species from the very first forms of life to our own.”

Shawna Vogel science writer

Naked Earth: the New Geophysics (1995)

History, Life

“I think the greatest oxymoron on the face of this earth is to use the word 'science' along with 'evolution.'”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Evolution's a fairy tale for grown ups... It's unprovable, it's not been proved.
Source: AronRa vs Ray Comfort (September 17th, 2012), Radio Paul's Radio Rants

Thinking, Science

“Naturally, form has come to take precedence over color with me, though when I began painting color predominated. Slowly artistic evolution carried from color to form and while I still employ color, of course, it is the drawing which assumes the place of first importance in my pictures.”

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) French painter and writer

Quote of Picabia, in an interview in an American newspaper, 1915; as quoted by William A. Camfield, in Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, Princeton, 1979, p.77
Picabia emphasised that line took precedence over colour in his works since 1915
1910's

Drawing, Painting, Nature, Color