Society and the World

‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

Does it matter?—losing your sight? …

I hate victims who respect their executioners.

I am condemned to be free.

When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.

When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15–inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

‘Change’ is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.