The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.

We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.

Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

Democracy must be a sound scheme at bottom, else it would not survive such cruel strains.