The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense.

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action..

In a Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved its fortunes by shooting….

It would have been very much better for the world if Britain had remained neutral and the Germans had won a quick victory. We should not have had eit….

I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover 25 miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me….

Modern American politicians have the same cowardice about denying an equally bloodthirsty even sillier god, Jehovah. None of us would seriously cons….

Uncertainty in the pressure of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales..

In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis..

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one..

If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just be the world as God..

I believe that Communism is necessary to the world, and I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men's hopes in a way which was essential to th….

To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead..

While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make..

There is... in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times - I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejecte….

We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any know….

Every sane and sensible and quiet thing we do is absolutely ignored by the press..

When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the ….

To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement..

You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this ….

Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau..

Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the worl….