There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.

I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery. . . I am quite willing to believe that anything in deductive logic can be done by machinery.

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery, and in such a world hopes could only be irrational.

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.

All movements go too far.

Citizens as conceived by governments are persons who admire the status quo and are prepared to exert themselves for its preservation. Oddly enough, while all governments aim at producing men of this type to the exclusion of all other types, their heroes in the past are of exactly the sort that they aim at preventing in the present. Americans admire George Washington and Jefferson, but imprison those who share their political opinions.