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

Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization.

The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left.

When I say that children should be told about sex, I do not mean that they should be told only the bare physiological facts; they should be told whatever they wish to know. There should be no attempt to represent adults as more virtuous than they are, or sex as occurring only in marriage. There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them, and feel justified in lying to them.

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.