Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.

We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.