Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work.

I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.