I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long....

For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or...

Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.

Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

These illustrations suggest four general maxims[…]. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t over-estimate your own merits. The third is: don’t...

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give...

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: “The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.” In these words he...

The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for...

You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought.

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Intellectually, what is stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical importance. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to hear lectures from individualists and socialists, protectionists and free-traders, inflationists and...

In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of...

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to...

Consideremos la larga historia de las actividades inspiradas por el fervor moral: los sacrificios humanos, las persecuciones de herejes, las cazas de brujas, los pogroms, hasta que se llega al exterminio en gran escala por...

Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a...

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember...

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable...

Education should aim at destroying free will so thatpupils thus schooled, will be incapable throughoutthe rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwisethan as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . .Influences of the...

Over a billion people believe in Allah without truly knowing what Allah supposedly stands for or what he really demands of them. And the minority that do understand continue to be Moslems because they have...

Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest...

Not only teachers, but all commonplace persons in authority,desire in their subordinates that kind of uniformitywhich makes their actions easily predictable and never inconvenient.The result is that they crush initiative and individualitywhen they can, and...

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people...

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not...

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument...

Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own...

The habit of considering a man’s religious, moral and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution.

El obispo pasa a argüir que ‘el universo ha sido hecho y está gobernado por un propósito inteligente’ y que sería una falta de inteligencia el haber hecho al hombre para que pereciera. Hay muchas...

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? The reason is clearly that the human heart as modern civilisation has made it...

All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.

The accusation of metaphysics has become in philosophy something like the accusation of being a security risk in the public service. I do not for my part know what is meant by the word ‘metaphysics’....

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were...

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is...

The attitude of uncompromising heroism is attractive, and appeals especially to the dramatic instinct. But the purpose of the serious revolutionary is not personal heroism, nor martyrdom, but the creation of a happier world. Those...

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.

You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could...

The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates…Moreover, since politicians are divided...

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so,it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that gaurds the door,and this dragon is religion