Compassion is the basis of morality.

If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.

Money is human happiness in the abstract.

There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.

To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.