“The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

“Believing passionately in the palpably not true... is the chief occupation of mankind.”

“The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”

“Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.”

“Nevertheless, it is the Christian theory that it is only a regard for this Being -- partly a trembling fear and partly a kind of conciliation represented to be love -- that keeps the human race from roaring downhill to villainy and disaster. Nor are theologians daunted by the obvious fact that many open and even ribald skeptics are not going that way, but, on the contrary, show a considerably higher degree of virtue than the Christian average. Their answer ... is that the moral sense of every such blameless candidate for Hell 'is a kind of parasitic growth upon the otherworldliness of the society in which he lives.' ... Even men who should know better indulge in this confusion between the religious impulse and common decency. ... But this is surely going beyond the plain facts. A man may be truly religious without imagining God as good at all, and he may be good without believing that there is any moral order in the universe or even that God exists. Religion does not necessarily make men better citizens, whether of their neighborhoods or of the world.”

“To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!”