Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom – desire coordinated in the light of all experience – can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Education is the transformation of civilisation.
The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It’s the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.
Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.