Drunkeness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer

The . . . increase in the power of officials is a constant source of irritation to everybody else.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.

I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.