... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.

The institution of representative government to us seems an essential part of democracy, but the ancients never thought of it. Its immense merit was that it enabled a large constituency to exert indirect power, and thus made possible the distribution of political responsibility throughout the great states of modern times.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.

To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.

It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity.