I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.

The teacher, like the artist, the philosopher, and the man of letters, can only perform his work adequately if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Every sane and sensible and quiet thing we do is absolutely ignored by the press.

Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak in a manner that suggests the mystique of the 'common man.'

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth. I'm not contending in a dogmatic way that there is not a God. What I'm contending is that we don't know that there is. I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.