It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
Our use of phrase ‘The Dark ages’ to cover the period from 699 to 1,000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe...
From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary...
To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view.
The best practical advice I can give to the present generation is to practice the virtue which the Christians call love.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.
We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within.
Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.
Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.
Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.
Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else.
What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.
Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.
Love, children, and work, are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.
Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes.
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit; divorced from it, they remain barren.
Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Much of the most important evils that mankind have to consider are those which they inflict upon each other through stupidity or malevolence or both.
There’s a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire – poison and antidote.