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

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.

The problem of finding a collection of “wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

We have fallen on hard times of the spirit, with many of the people more concerned with fear of evil than contemplation of the good.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

When people are bewildered they tend to become credulous.

We're surrounded. That simplifies the problem!

I have a tendency toward being a micromanager.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.

A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.

I try not to eat too much fast food but still go for hot wings occasionally. As I get older, I have to pay more attention to my diet. My favorite food is jerk pork.