Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
No great achievement is possible without persistent work.
A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
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.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.
I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work.
Belief systems provide a programme which relieves the necessity of thought.
Cruel men believe in a cruel god and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly god, and they would be kindly in any case.
When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
Life is just one cup of coffee after another, and don't look for anything else.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
The discipline in your life should be one determined by your own desires and your own needs, not put upon you by society or authority.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom.
The chicken noticed that the farmer came every day to feed it. It predicted that the farmer would continue to bring food every day. Inductivists think that the chicken had "extrapolated" its observations into a theory, and that each feeding time added justification to that theory. Then one day the farmer came and wrung the chicken's neck. This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusion.
I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror... As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight.
I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
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