Alphabetical Index of Authors

1. Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
2. Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
3. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
4. There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
5. A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
6. The habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.
7. Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
8. Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
9. Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
10. No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
11. Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
12. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
13. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
14. Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
15. Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.