“History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin ...” — Thomas Huxley Quote

“History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.”

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.”

“Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”

“The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.”

“The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.”

“Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.”

“Back during the most dramatic and challenging time in our history, when we first came together with wolves, we had no idea that it was changing everything, but we literally evolved together. Without us there would be no dogs, and vice versa.”

“'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.”

“The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.”

“If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!”

“I'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.”