Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.                        

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. 

I wish I believed in a timeless Platonic world, where whatever has had a momentary existence in the stream of time survives timelessly in heaven. The moments of ecstasy in love, of sudden intellectual insight, of intoxicating glory in storms on a rocky coast. . . I should like to think of these as forever part of the universe. But that is mysticism and folly, born of fear. If we must die, let us die sober, not drunk with pleasant lies. . .I should like to end gloriously and greatly like a Shakespeare hero; it is shocking to think that as the bomb bursts I shall be wondering how to find the money for next month’s bills.

The world needs open hearts and open minds and it is not through rigid systems, whether old or new that these can be derived. What people need is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with the belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity. Many religious leaders have shown great personal courage, but what they invariably lacked was the intellectual courage to face the world without the security of comfortable myths. For, in the final analysis, it is personal responsibility which is significant in human affairs.

 My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. 

 What appears to justify persecution is dogmatic belief. . .The spirit of tolerance which some modern Christians regard as essentially Christian is, in fact, a product of the temper which allows doubt and is suspicious of absolute certainties.

I think all the great religions of the world both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true. With very few exceptions, the religion which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what led him to accept the religion in question. 

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.                

Capitalists, militarists and ecclesiastics co-operate in education because all depend for their power on the prevalence of emotionalism and the rarity of critical judgment.

Protestants like to be good and have invented theology in order to keep themselves so, whereas Catholics like to be bad and have invented theology in order to keep their neighbors good. 

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than death. Men would rather die than think - in fact they do! Thought is subversive  and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ...  Thought is great and swift  and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.But if thought is to become the possession of the many, and not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back - fear that their cherished belief should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves prove less worthy to the respect then they have supposed themselves to be.

Complete rationality is no doubt an unattainable ideal, but as long as we continue to classify some men as lunatics it is clear that we think some men are more rational than others.

Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

The method of postulating what we want has many advantages. They are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil

If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called “education. 

We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love.

Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm . . . What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith”. We do not speak of faith that two plus two is four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Indian’s view, that the world rested upon a tortoise; and when someone said, “How about the tortoise?”, the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject."

There is something feeble and contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comfortable. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.

In Haiti, when they make statues of Christ and Satan, they make Christ black and Satan white. Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.                                        

The attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.              

So long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans.

It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it

I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one doubts the existence of  material objects and holds that the world  may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an  agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than  the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between Earth and  Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them. The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.

People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.  

I do not understand where the “beauty” and “harmony” of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. 

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Thomas Aquinas. He does not, like Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith.

Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with a less stoic courage than is needed by skeptics. . . Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in doing so it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage . . .

To allow oneself to entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding fear is not to live in the best way. In so far as religion makes its appeal to fear, it is lowering to human dignity. 

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have an elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing - fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. 

Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the Churches in all these centuries have made it. 

If everything happens according to God’s will, God must have wanted Nero to murder his mother; therefore since God is good, the murder must have been a good thing. From this argument there is no escape.

Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce “proofs” for immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors - St. Thomas rejected St. Anselm’s proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes’ -  but they have supplied proofs of their own. In order to make their proofs they have had to falsify logic, make mathematics mystical, ,and to pretend that deep-seated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions. 

Pascal sacrificed his magnificent mathematical intellect to his God, thereby attributing to Him a barbarity which was a cosmic enlargement of Pascal’s morbid mental tortures. Dostoyevsky would have nothing to do with “proper pride”; he would sin in order to repent to enjoy the luxury of confession. 

Law in origin was simply the codification of the power of dominant groups, and it did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice. . . Wherever aristocracy existed, its members had various privileges that were not accorded to the plebs. In Japan before the Meiji era began a man who omitted to smile in the presence of a social superior could legally be killed then and there by the superior in question. This explains why European travelers find the Japanese a smiling race.  

 There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress. 

 As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our trouble. Whose authority? The New Testament? The Old Testament? The Koran? In practice, people choose the book considered sacred by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others.  

 Irrationalism, i.e., disbelief in objective fact, arises almost always from the desire to assert something for which there is no evidence, or to deny something for which there is very good evidence. 

 A good man is one whose opinions and actions are pleasing to the holders of power.             

 what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. 

 The utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically: it is not desired that people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties.

 One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity. . .The aim of education should be to cure people of the habit of believing propositions for which there is no evidence.           

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way opinions are held in science, as opposed to the  way they are held in theology. Science is empirical, tentative, and un-dogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. The scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism. 

The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with the philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know and hate to be in error. 

Intellectual sobriety will lead us to scrutinize our beliefs closely, with a view to discovering which of them there is any reason to believe true. If we are wise, we shall apply solvent criticism especially to the beliefs which it is most painful to doubt, and those most likely to involve us in violent conflict with men who hold opposite but equally groundless beliefs. 

Throughout the last 400 years, during which the growth of science had gradually shown men how to acquire knowledge of the ways of nature and mastery over natural forces, the clergy have fought a losing battle against science, in astronomy and geology, in anatomy and physiology, in biology and psychology and sociology. Ousted from one position, they have taken up another. After being worsted in astronomy, they did their best to prevent the rise of geology; they fought against Darwin in biology, and at the present time they fight against scientific theories of psychology and education. At each stage, they try to make the public forget their earlier obscurantism, in order that their present obscurantism may not be recognized for what it is.

The expression 'free thought' is often used as if it meant merely opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. But this is only a symptom of free thought, frequent, but invariable. 'Free thought' means thinking freely -- as freely, at least, as is possible for a human being. The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the free thinker free from? To be worthy of the name, he must be free of two things: the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, but in the measure of a man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker.

The moderns differ from the men of the thir­teenth century both in aim and in method. Democracy has substituted co-operation for submission and herd-instinct for reverence; the group in regard to which herd-instinct is to be most operative has become the nation, which was formerly rendered unimportant by the universality of the Church. Meanwhile propaganda has become per­suasive rather than forceful, and has learnt to proceed by the instilling of suitable sentiments in early youth. Church music, school songs, and the flag determine, by their influence on the boy, the subsequent actions of the man in moments of strong emotion. Against these influences the assaults of reason have but little power.  

Ultimate values are not matters as to which argument is possible. If a man maintains that misery is desirable, and that it would be a good thing if everybody always had violent toothache, we may dis­agree with him, and we may laugh at him when we catch him going to the dentist, but we cannot prove that he is mistaken, as we could if he said that iron is lighter than water. If a prophet were to advance the theory that happiness should be confined to those whose first name begins with Z, he might receive the enthusiastic support of an army of Zacharys and Zedekiabs and Zebedees, but would ultimately be de­feated by the solid legions of Johns and Georges. This would, how­ever, be only a pragmatic refutation of the prophet's message, which would remain logically just as good as its contradictory. As to ul­timate values, men may agree or disagree, they may fight with guns or with ballot-papers, but they cannot reason logically.  

In practical life, questions as to ultimate values hardly ever arise in their logical purity, since men are concerned with what should be done. Whether an act should be performed depends upon two con­siderations: first, what its effects are likely to be; second, whether these effects are on the whole good, or, more accurately, whether, on the balance, they are better than the effects of any other act which is possible in the circumstances. Of these two questions, the first is scientific, not ethical, and is amenable to rational argument, like every other scientific question. It is only when a dispute as to what should be done turns on the second question that there is no theoreti­cal possibility of deciding it by argument. 

It is said that Caesar was killed on the Ides of March. I have not examined the evidence with any care, but I have read the statement in various books which appear reliable, and I therefore believe it. In youth it may be useful to believe it, since it may be a help in getting through examinations; but when once the period of examinations is passed, this belief ceases to serve any useful purpose. At any rate, to come to our second assumption, it is clearly easier to know the truth of the proposition 'Caesar was killed on the Ides of March' than it is to know its utility, which, except to examinees, is extremely question-able. In saying this, I may seem to contradict my third assumption, namely, that as a general rule it is more useful to believe what is true than what is false. This is only correct when there is utility in one or other. Most propositions are not worth either believing or disbelieving. Imagine the multiplication table extended indefinitely to larger and larger numbers: it would contain an infinite number of propositions, of which only a finite number would be useful in prac­tice. But whenever, for some reason, one of these propositions is needed, it is in the highest degree improbable that it will be better to get it wrong than right. It is not impossible, since you may have made a previous mistake which is just balanced by your new mistake. But this possibility is too remote to concern the politician, who rightly demands that children shall do their sums right.