no one ever gossips about the virtues of others

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years.

What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.

There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes.