Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.

I feel as if one would only discover on one's death bed what one ought to have lived for

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.