The teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians.

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.