The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
The ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.
Religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature.
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
Just as no one can be forced to believe, so no one can be forced to disbelieve.