The purpose of education is to teach a defense against eloquence..

Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who….

I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel..

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became gen….

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error..

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..

Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and sister; should they let the human race die out?.

The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults ….

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled wit….

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate ….

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a….

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreem….

The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of ….

A democrat need not believe that the majority will always reach a wise decision. He should however believe in the necessity of accepting the decision….

I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity ….

If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy..

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….

I must confess that I am deeply troubled. I fear that human beings are intent upon acting out a vast deathwish and that it lies with us now to make e….

A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?.

What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy..