To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
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.
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.
I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
