A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.

In the arts of life main invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. … There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.

It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin.

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.