To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.

The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.

Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.

In the great depression, things could only be set right by causing the idle plant to work again . . . Roosevelt . . . spent billions of public money and created a huge public debt, but by so doing he revived production and brought his country out of the depression. Businessmen, who in spite of such a sharp lesson continued to believe in old-fashioned economics, were infinitely shocked, and although Roosevelt saved them from ruin, they continued to curse him and to speak of him as 'the madman in the White House.' . . . [It's one more] striking example of inability to learn from experience.

In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.

Change is one thing, progress is another.