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False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.
So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.
Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it's hurtful.
University President: Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers…and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers.
I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker. The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Ghandi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialistic, otherworldly, New Age spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu and seaweed slime.
Our defense is not in our armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order.
Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.
By giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it [modern journalism] keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
In light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alterations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light — only those who have experienced it can understand it.
Some of the waiters discuss the menu with you as if they were sharing wisdom picked up in the Himalayas.
Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.
The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.
It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.
We have inadvertently designed a system in which being good at what you do as a teacher is not formally rewarded, while being poor at what you do is seldom corrected nor penalized.
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.
