It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

There is held to be no surer test of civilization than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcohol and tobacco are recognizable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilization altogether.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

Where there is most labour there is not always most life.

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.