Intolerance is evidence of impotence.
Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.
To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.