"Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept."

"Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time."

"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."

"Drunkenness is temporary suicide."

"Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me."

"Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate."

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."

"A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known."

"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."

"Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change."

"Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy."

"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so."

"Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom."

"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live."

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."

"Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."

"Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted."

"The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour."

"Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities."

"The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd."

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."

"None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear."

"There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less."

"I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex."

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."

"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."

"The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours."

"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years."

"Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one."

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation."

"In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word."

"Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age."

"Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?"

"Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance."

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards."

"Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself."

"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power."

"If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all."

"To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it."

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

"No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?"

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."

"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics."

"The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe."