Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings.

All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.