Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

For some reason which I have failed to understand, many people like the system [scientific totalitarianism] when it is Russian but disliked the very same system when it was German. I am compelled to think that this is due to the power of labels; these people like whatever is labelled ‘Left’ without examining whether the label has any justification.