The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
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.
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.