Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given

If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

Protagoras did not know if the gods exist, but he held in any case they ought to be worshiped. Philosophy, according to him, had nothing edifying to teach, and for the survival of morals we must rely upon the thoughtlessness of the majority and their willingness to believe what they had been taught.