Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

• To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
• It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
• Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
• Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
• Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
• Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
• The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
• The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
• The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
• Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.