But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.