You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so called age of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of science.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.