Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.
The harm that theology has done is not to create cruel impulses, but to give them the sanction of what professes to be lofty ethic, and to confer an apparently sacred character upon practices which have come down from more ignorant and barbarous times.
I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions.
All movements go too far.
The power of thought, the vast regions it can master.
Some people would rather die than think.
This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.
We may often do as we please - but we cannot please as we please.
The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.
When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is the result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth, and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination... When a motorcar fails to start, we do not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, we do not say, you are a wicked motorcar, and you shall not have any more gasoline until you go.
There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.
Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.
Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife.
There seems scarcely any limit to what could be done in the way of producing a good world, if only men would use science wisely.
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.
One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.
The really useful education is that which follows the direction of the child's own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.
As soon as it is held that any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up.
Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.
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