Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one.
Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.
Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.
Physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Perhaps, instead of teaching manners, parents should teach the statistical probability that the person you are speaking to is just as good as you are.
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.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.
One must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.
One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
Of remoter ancestors I can only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off.
