“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of great fear.

Your writing is never as good as you hoped, but never as bad as you feared.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

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

The use of self-control is like the use of brakes on the train. It is useful when you find yourself in the wrong direction but merely harmful when the direction is right.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won’t go.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.

Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.

I cannot live without books.

A house that has a library in it has a soul.

Reading the Martin Luther King story, that little comic book, set me on the path that I’m on today.

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

A kid can never have too many books!

The prime function of the children’s book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it.

I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren’t in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets.