No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, 'You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.' He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right.

For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy

God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.

As for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them.