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.
Ideas and principles that do harm are as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions.
Cruelty is, in theory, a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.
Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men that comes chiefly through their work.
What’s the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.
Worry is a form of fear.
The method of “postulating” what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate.
Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale.
Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do.
I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists – that is why they invented hell.
There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.
Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion go hand in hand.
Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself.
The whiter my hair becomes, the more ready people are to believe what I say.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
I have come to realize that an early symptom of approaching mental illness is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. If you consider your work very important you should take a day off.