One of the troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds on. The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about |
One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny |
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. |
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. |
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias. |
Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance. |
Organizations are of two kinds, those which aim at getting something done, and those which aim at preventing something from being done |
Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale |
Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should. |
Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor |
Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men |
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. |
Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country. |
People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true |
Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly, they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines. |