Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven.
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.
Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced.
Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.
I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
An educator should think of a child as a gardener thinks of a plant, as something to be made to grow by having the right soil and the right amount of water. If your roses fail to bloom, it does not occur to you to whip them, but you try to find out what has been amiss in your treatment of them. ... The important thing is what the children do, and not what they do not do. And what they do, if it is to have value, must be a spontaneous expression of their own vital energy.
We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions.
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.
A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
It's not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts.
You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.
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 immeasurably superior to all your friends. Exercises of this sort, prolonged through several years, will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.
Next to worry probably one of the most potent causes of unhappiness is envy.
If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?
Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
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