The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique..

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the ….

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible..

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth abo….

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time..

A religious creed differs from a scientific theory in claiming to embody eternal and absolutely certain truth, whereas science is always tentative, e….

Love can only flourish as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought that it is a duty. To say that it is your duty to ….

I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, oppon….

In the great depression, things could only be set right by causing the idle plant to work again . . . Roosevelt . . . spent billions of public money ….

no one ever gossips about the virtues of others.

Admit at least one painful truth to yourself every day. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not immeasurabl….

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age..

Bacon not only despised the syllogism, but undervalued mathematics, presumably as insufficiently experimental. He was virulently hostile to Aristotle….

Even if it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic proces….

Dr. Arnold . . . the admired reformer of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst o….

In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outwar….

Insight, untested and unsupported, is an uncertain guarantee of the truth..

I suppose the advocates of unreason think that there is a better chance of profitably deceiving the populace if they keep it in a state of effervesce….

Love cannot exists as a duty; to tell a child that it ought to love its parents and its brother and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse..

Science, by itself, cannot supply us with an ethic. It can show us how to achieve a given end, and it may show us that some ends cannot be achieved..

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true..