It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
dont let the old break you; let the love make you
Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.
The very best proof that something can be done is that someone has already done it.
The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.
Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.
I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.
When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.
My first advice (on how not to grow old) would be to choose you ancestors carefully.
Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.
And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country`s pride.
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family.
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.
The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.
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