There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

The person who is ignorant enough to believe that his nourishment depends on meat is in a horrible dilemma.

Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.

We are compelled by the theory of God's already achieved perfection to make Him a devil as well as a god, because of the existenceof evil. The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient, must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.... Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a perfect being.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.