“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”

“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

“All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.”

“The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware he is wise.”

“One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.”

“It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.”