The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.

It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.