The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.

There is no a prior reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.

One must look at what impiety hates, what puts it in a rage, what it attacks always, everywhere, and with fury - that will be the truth.

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be and do - and that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing.