The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

What a heartbreaking job it is trying to combine authors for their own protection... the first lesson I learned was that when you take the field for the authors you will be safer without a breastplate than without a backplate.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

Poverty does not produce unhappiness: It produces degradation.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.