It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

As soon as it is held that any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up.

Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.

The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.