One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.
More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given.
If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.
Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in the Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.
The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know.
What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.
Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.
It’s coexistence or no existence.
War can only be abolished by the establishment of a world government.
Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.
The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against nature.
Cruel men believe in a cruel god and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly god, and they would be kindly in any case.
There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.