Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously

Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary

The practical politician, as every connoisseur of ochlocracy knows, is not a man who seeks to inoculate the innumerable caravan of voters with new ideas; he is a man who seeks to search out and prick into energy the basic ideas that are already in the

Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas

Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the veriform appendix and God