If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey.

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture

Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.

Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.

Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact...but it needs light from heaven above to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student is accustomed to seeing.

Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view

When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived