A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

Indemnity for the past and security for the future.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.

We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.

Our use of the phrase 'The Dark Ages' to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. [...] From India to Spain, the brilliant civilisation of Islam flourished. What was lost to Christendom at this time was not lost to civilisation, but quite the contrary. [...] To us it seems that West-European civilisation is civilisation, but this is a narrow view.