Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creatingfuture dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.

The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.