St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
You could live without the opera singer, but not without the services of the baker. On this ground you might say that the baker performs a greater service; but no lover of music would agree.
If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?
You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a presidential election is produced by the votes of single electors.
No Carthaginian denied Moloch, because to do so would have required more courage that was required to face death in battle.
This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.
One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.
The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should.
What is matter? Never mind.
The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.
Affection cannot be created; it can only be liberated.
I’ve always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.
The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.
The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the second chance were offered me.
Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.
The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress. It’s coexistence or no existence.