One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his or her work important.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense

I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.

Men have physical needs, and they have emotions. While physical needs are unsatisfied, they take first place; but when they are satisfied, emotions unconnected with them become important in deciding whether a man is to be happy or unhappy.

Africans had to be taught that nudity is wicked; this was done very cheaply by missionaries.

Much of the most important evils that mankind have to consider are those which they inflict upon each other through stupidity or malevolence or both.