“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

Which is better – to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?

In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

It is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so.

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

I was more inclined to think of it as “writer’s impatience”, and to follow Arthur Koestler’s dictum: “Soak; and wait.

I’m more inclined to linger in the science pages of ‘The Week’ magazine.

I am somehow inclined to move against this current, in search of what it might mean to be connected not just spiritually, but also vertically.

The people that are inclined to hate, are also inclined to be losers.

The dank night is sweeping down from the sky and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.