It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The law is reason, free from passion.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

Nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

The word ‚belief‘ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways, because that is abuse, and I can’t think for myself and so on. And I think that is so annoying! I’m also allowed to have a say – why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.