Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

The teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians.

Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.