A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal.

In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself ... may have had anything but a public motive... The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives... He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.

The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say the odds are about three to one against survival.

A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

No opinion has ever been too errant to become a creed.