“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth. Eloquence may set fire to reason.”

“Man can commit atrocities, or incite others to commit them, not because of a personality disorder, but because of his belief in ideas that provoke and justify atrocities.”

“To believe in nothing is as ridiculous as to believe in everything. Reason and factual evidence may convert a belief into knowledge.”

“... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors—for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame—that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them...”

“To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to have some kind of guiding principle. A belief of some kind”

“No belief or idea is sacred, unless it treats all people as sacred”