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Charles Darwin

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If this book were to find general public acceptance, it would bring with it a brutalization of the human race such as it had never seen before.
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One often finds this as a quote about Darwin's book The Origin of Species from Darwin's friend and teacher Adam Sedgwick.
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However, this "quote" goes back to A.E. Wilder-Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny: A Critical Survey of the Principles of Evolution and Christianity (H. Shaw Publishers, 1968) page 190, where it is clear that Wilder-Smith is describing Sedgwick's position, not quoting him.
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In fact, Sedgwick did write that "If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!" (letter to Charles Lyell, 9 April 1845, published in The Life and Letters of the Rev. Adam Sedgwick (1890) volume 2, page 84).
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But the book Sedgwick was commenting upon in this passage was not Darwin's The Origin of Species (published in 1859), but Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (published in 1844).

 
Charles Darwin

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I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single... well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.

 
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John Ruskin
 

Feelings were running high, for the conviction of Esterhazy would inevitably lead to a retrial of Dreyfus, an eventuality that the General Staff wanted at all cost to avoid.
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Pandurang Shastri Athavale
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