While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.

The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.

It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.