The Ten Commandments should be headed like an examination paper: No more than six to be attempted.
I suppose the advocates of unreason think that there is a better chance of profitably deceiving the populace if they keep it in a state of effervescence.
Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.
Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell.
Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.
The really useful education is that which follows the direction of the child’s own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.
Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence.
Always remember that true happiness is not in getting what you want, but wanting what you already have. He who dies with the most toys is still dead. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
The purpose of education is to teach a defense against eloquence.
Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.
The taboo against nakedness is an obstacle to a decent attitude on the subject of sex.
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.
It would have been very much better for the world if Britain had remained neutral and the Germans had won a quick victory. We should not have had either the Nazis or the Communists if that had happened.
Every sane and sensible and quiet thing we do is absolutely ignored by the press.
One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did.
It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare.
The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.
Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation.
I never held Negroes to be inherently inferior. The statement in Marriage and Morals refers to environmental conditioning. I have had it withdrawn from subsequent editions because it is clearly ambiguous.