Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.

The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security.

In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.

I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them though life against the shafts of impartial evidence.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.