"The history of human progress is a story of emancipation, and its course has by no means been run. The future of the race is in all likelihood to be a scientific future, since science gives the truth needed in actual life and furnishes the means for advance, every achievement enlarging the field of subsequent possibilities. Nothing can stop this growth except suppressions of freedom."

“If you can bring me one student whose faith I have injured in Mormonism, I will bring you five that you, through your narrowness, have driven out of the church.”

“Not too much science but too little science is at the root of our troubles.”

“Only the childish and immature mind can lose by learning that much in the Old Testament is poetical and that some of the stories are not true historically. Poetry is a superior medium for conveying religious truth.”

“When we see men still so unhappily bound with prejudice and tradition that they are blind to the beauties and light of the grandest conception that science has yet won for man, we sorrow, and in sympathy again recall the plea that the unhappy Castelli made to the pope who was about to inflict punishment upon Galileo for his demonstration of the movements of the earth: "Your Holiness, nothing that can be done can now hinder the earth from moving.”

“ven within the realm of the strictly scientific; we need constant touch with the concrete realities of living nature to prevent our picturing her as exclusively such as we make her in our specialties and in our private dreams.”

“As long as we go back often to Nature herself, and practice the art of then forgetting for the time the fictions and hypotheses necessary in the partial treatments of our specialities,—as long as we thereby allow Nature and her facts to speak to us for themselves,—so long shall we, after each fresh contact, return to our labors with renewed strength and clarified vision.”