Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years.

Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.

Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.

If the West can claim superiority in anything, it is . . . in science and scientific technique.