Tom Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech is a contrarian book that attacks Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. The book starts with the biographical reminder that Darwin was the epitome was a comically privileged white male, a fact often pushed under the rug when talking about Darwin.

“Charles Darwin’s dad nudged him into marrying in his perfectly nice, if plain, thirty-year-old spinster first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and bought them a country place and settled enough money on him for the boy to live well forever and ever. Living well included eight or nine servants— a butler, a cook, a manservant or two, a parlor maid, a lady’s maid, and at least one nanny and a governess— from day one.”

Annotation

Quote modified for readability in my comp. 

Explore more quotes:


About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.