Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships of philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships.
dont let the old break you; let the love make you
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
The very best proof that something can be done is that someone has already done it.
Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.
My first advice (on how not to grow old) would be to choose you ancestors carefully.
Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.
I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.
Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.
The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.
Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.
And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country`s pride.
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.
I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family.
The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
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