People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to.