Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.

The fact that many people should be shocked by what he writes practically imposes it as a duty upon the writer to go on shocking them.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.

Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings and actions that make for peace and freedom.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion ... Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.