Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)
British naturalist who revolutionized the study of biology with his theory of evolution based on natural selection

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Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. There is grandeur in this view of life that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
-- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science.
-- Charles Darwin, quoted from Michael Shermer, "The Gradual Illumination of the Mind: Reconsiderations and Recapitulations on the God Question," Introduction to the paperback edition" of How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (2000)

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
-- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, quoted from John Stear, No Answers in Genesis

What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature.
-- Charles Darwin, quoted by Richard Dawkins in A Devil's Chaplain (2004)

When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
-- Charles Darwin, reminding his readers that they should always treat "obvious" truths with skepticism, in the context of the apparent absurdity of evolving a complex eye through a long series of gradual steps, in the famous passage added to later editions of the Origin of Species (1872, p. 134), quoted from Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), chapter 1, "Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory," p. 1 (the bracketed translation is Gould's)

I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.
-- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man p. 61

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin, Introduction to The Descent of Man (1871)

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
-- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

A celebrated author and divine has written to me that "he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws."
-- Charles Darwin, Origin of Species p. 422

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that allobservation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!
-- Charles Darwin, letter to Henry Fawcett, who had defended Darwin before the British Association for the Advancement of Science against a critic who said Darwin's book was too theoretical and that he should have just "'put his facts before us and let them rest," quoted from Michael Shermer, "Colorful Pebbles and Darwin's Dictum: Science is an exquisite blend of data and theory," Scientific American, May, 2001

Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.
-- Charles Darwin, letter to Wallace: had Thomson's conclusions been correct, evolution by natural selection would have been falsified, but, Thomson's conclusions were wrong and Darwin's theory was not thereby falsified, quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001)

How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.
-- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man p. 122

It is like confessing to a murder.
-- Charles Darwin, quoted from the press release for the PBS television series Evolution with the comment, "For 21 years, Charles Darwin kept his theory of evolution secret from all but a few friends"

I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.
-- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man p. 612

I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower from, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction. The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events, which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.
-- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man p. 613

But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.
-- Charles Darwin, (attributed: source unknown)

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
-- Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, cited in Peter's Quotations, by Lawrence J Peter (1977), p. 45, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996)

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