“Whatever is, is in its causes just;But purblind manSees but a part o' th' chain; the nearest link;His eyes not carrying to that equal beamThat poises all above.”

“You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.”

“No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”

“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”

“There's naught as nice as th' smell o' good clean earth, except th' smell o' fresh growin' things when th' rain falls on 'em.”

“Is every day an adventure with its own drive? Or an interlocked link in the chain of our life?Are we, then, the masters of our own milky way?Or just conductors, confined to the music of today?”