I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion.

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.

God: a gaseous vertebrate.

Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.