Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace, The prurient ape’s defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow’s misdeeds out of yesterday’s miscreeds?
Nothing short of everything will really do.
The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.
Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.
Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.
For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.
A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail’s a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.
All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time.
The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.
In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.
Happiness is never grand.
Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.
I don’t care where I’m from, nor where I’m going. From hell to hell.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to believe in God.
The lunatic fringe is more like a Spanish shawl, where the fringe makes up the entire garment.
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons – that’s philosophy.