The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent.

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

Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it.

I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.

Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships of philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships.

Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself.

There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.