Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
Christ . . . said that a man who had looked after a woman lustfully had sinned as much as the man who had seduced her. How absurd!
There may be no good reasons for very many opinions that are held with passion.
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
Ants and savages put strangers to death.
I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is a paradox; as is a paradox why the number 1 is not prime if it has no other divisors besides himself.
If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
War can only be abolished by the establishment of a world government.
Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.
Memory demands an image.
All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.
When I say that children should be told about sex, I do not mean that they should be told only the bare physiological facts; they should be told whatever they wish to know. There should be no attempt to represent adults as more virtuous than they are, or sex as occurring only in marriage. There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them, and feel justified in lying to them.
What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.
Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable.
Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.
Choose your parents wisely.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
It's coexistence or no existence.
In former days, men sold themselves to the Devil to acquire magical powers. Nowadays they acquire those powers from science, and find themselves compelled to become devils. There is no hope for the world unless power can be tamed, and brought into the service, not of this or that group of fanatical tyrants, but of the whole human race, white and yellow and black, fascist and communist and democrat; for science has made it inevitable that all must live or all must die.
I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have nor the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
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