“A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”

Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.

History is just new people making old mistakes.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

The madman is a dreamer awake.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly.

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.

There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.

All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

A strong egoism is a protection.

The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

When space travel becomes as common as air travel, the future of civilization will be assured.

In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.

The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.