“Happiness is promoted by associations of persons with similar tastes and similar opinions.”

“The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.”

“The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.”

“Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”

“It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.”

“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”

“One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”