A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

Admit at least one painful truth to yourself every day. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not immeasurably superior to all your friends. Exercises of this sort, prolonged through several years, will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field.

In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

The Mormons had a divine revelation in favour of polygamy, but under pressure from the United States Government they discovered that the revelation was not binding.

There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.