on the side of the angels on the side of what is right.
☞ In a speech in Oxford in November 1864 the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli alluded to the controversy over the origins of humankind then raging in the wake of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859): 'Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of the angels' (The Times 26 Nov. 1864).