Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

Christ . . . said that a man who had looked after a woman lustfully had sinned as much as the man who had seduced her. How absurd!

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

[Man] ... his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.

All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

In spreading his ideas, Plato was willing to employ emotional appeals, state propaganda, and the use of force.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.