The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.