The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.

For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.

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.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.

I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.

Ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions.

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.