The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.