“In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.”

Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.

The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.

No other offense has ever been visited with such severe penalties as seeking to help the oppressed.

We’re all killers at heart, I have never taken anybody’s life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.

Everybody is a potential murderer. I’ve never killed anyone, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices.

No nation can be really great that is held together by Gatling guns, and no true loyalty can be induced and kept through fear.

It’s not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.

I have always felt that doubt was the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God was the end of wisdom.

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.

You can’t get to a pleasant place to be at unless you use pleasant methods to get there. When you are dealing with a human society the means is fully as important as the end.

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

Life is a never-ending school, and the really important lessons all tend to teach man his proper relation to the environment where he must live.

The really intelligent are as abnormal as the defective. The great masses of men are rather mediocre, and those above and below are exceptions.

The audience that storms the box-office of the theater to gain entrance to a sensational show is small and sleepy compared with the throng that crashes the courthouse door when something concerning real life and death is to be laid bare to the public.

Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man’s origin, capacity and responsibility.