The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.
To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.
Religion is based ... mainly upon fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
The key to happiness is accepting one unpleasant reality every day.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
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.
War doesn't determine who's right, it determines who's left
When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Why repeat the old errors, if there are so many new errors to commit?
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.
If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. [...] The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.
An Honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid ... because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.
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