The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets.

Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

There is, of course, no complete solution. But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves.

I should never have made a good scientist, but I should have made a perfectly adequate one.

I felt I was moving among two groups [literary intellectuals and scientists] comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington Hom or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.