I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

Fear first created the gods.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.