“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

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

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

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.

First thing every morning before you arise say out loud, ‘I believe,’ three times.

All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them

In the lack of judgment great harm arises, but one vote cast can set right a house.