Insight, untested and unsupported, is an uncertain guarantee of the truth.
What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.
It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world.
When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to know.
No other organization rouses anything like the loyalty aroused by the national State. And the chief activity of the State is preparation for large-scale homicide.
Faith: a firm belief for which there is no evidence.
When we look at a rock what we are seeing is not the rock, but the effect of the rock upon us.
Memory demands an image.
I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people’s satisfy me still less.
I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in the organised diminution of work.
Teachers are more than any other group the guardians of civilization.
As for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them.
Logic must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can.
Africans had to be taught that nudity is wicked; this was done very cheaply by missionaries.
Americans need rest, but do not know it.
Among the Tibetans, one wife has many husbands, because men are too poor to support a whole wife.
Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.
As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.
Escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.
European travellers find the Japanese a smiling race.