The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
[T]he vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been per...
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligen...
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost...
Experience teaches only the teachable.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concent...
Choiceless awareness - at every moment and in all the circumstances of life - is the only effective meditation.
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain...
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that w...
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more eff...
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more...
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridicu...