Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished.

When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.

In the traditional view, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and justly punished if he offends. That view, together with its associated practices, must be re-examined when a scientific analysis reveals unsuspected controlling relations between behavior and environment.

If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.