Who ever heard a theologian preface his creed, or a politician conclude his speech with an estimate of the probable error of his opinion?
All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left.
Animal rights, taken to their logical conclusion, mean votes for oysters.
Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced.
Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization.
I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work.
I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.
Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.
One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.
There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence.
Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence.
When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience.
As soon as it is held that any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
It is false to suggest that men must turn away from his desires in the interest of a higher duty. Men only responds to duty if he desires to do so. To understand men, you must understand their desires and the relative strength of those desires.
Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn’t follow their religion would be tortured for eternity.
Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.
Intelligence, it might be said, has caused our troubles; but it is not unintelligence that will cure them. Only more and wiser intelligence can make a happier world.
All religions are both harmful and untrue.
The secrets to happiness include enterprise, exploration of one’s interests and the overcoming of obstacles.