The difficulty is old, but none the less real. An omnipotent being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.
An individual human existence should be like a river.
Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man.
Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events.
Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
We are told that Sin consists in acting contrary to God’s commands, but we are also told that God is omnipotent. If He is, nothing contrary to His will can occur; therefore when the sinner disobeys His commands, He must have intended this to happen.
We may often do as we please – but we cannot please as we please.
Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.
Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?
My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they’re not really interested in.
A man’s acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.
It is impossible to read in America, except on a train, because of the telephone. Everyone has a telephone, and it rings all day and most of the night.
The military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are tempted to think, and our superiority in civilization is a mere delusion.
More cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.
Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm.
Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
A good man will never suspect his friends of shady actions: this is part of his goodness. A good man will never be suspected by the public of using his goodness to screen villains: this is part of his utility.
In our complex world, there cannot be fruitful initiative without government, but unfortunately there can be government without initiative.
The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.