A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists, with even thinner and weaker voices, denounce him as an altruist.
And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate.
As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in liberals.
Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools.
Christianity...divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.
Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them.
I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now.
If we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end where paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity.
In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.
It did...cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
It had been supposed that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by extending our ego to infinity, [but] the truth is that the fullest possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing our ego to zero.
It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record.
It will not be necessary for any one to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.
It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are.
Life is...a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
Men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies...that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before.
Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss [religion]. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion...began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes.
Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy, but real love has always ended in bloodshed.
Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane.
The very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another.
There was far more courage to the square mile in the middle ages, when no king had a standing army, but every man had a bow or sword.
This triangle of truisms, of father, mother[,] and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
When [civilization] wants a library cataloged, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round.
With us the governing class is always saying to itself, 'What laws shall we make?' In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, 'What laws can we obey?'
You could compile...the worst book in the world entirely out of...passages from the best writers in the world.