To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy, or to pursue any excessive desire, diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.

A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.