Ants and savages put strangers to death.

The Mormons had a divine revelation in favour of polygamy, but under pressure from the United States Government they discovered that the revelation was not binding.

Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

The significance of a fact is relative to [the general body of scientific] knowledge. To say that a fact is significant in science, is to say that it helps to establish or refute some general law; for science, though it starts from observation of the particular, is not concerned essentially with the particular, but with the general. A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance. In this the scientist differs from the artist, who, if he deigns to notice facts at all, is likely to notice them in all their particularity.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercise their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.