Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.

A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.