Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn't follow their religion would be tortured for eternity.

The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.

Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just be the world as God.

Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization.

Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence.