For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.

The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together... For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself.

The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?