I
"The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens. Nearly all the whole of everyday journalism belongs to the former category: it is, in its customary aspects, no more than the reduction of vivid and recent impressions to banal sequences of time-worn words and phrases."
II
"All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence---and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence."
III
"Men are the only animals who devote themselves assiduously to making one another unhappy. It is, I suppose, one of their godlike qualities. Jahweh, as the Old Testament shows, spends a large part of His time trying to ruin the business and comfort of all other gods."
IV
"War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands."
V
"The belief that man is immortal is a vestige of the childish egoism which once made him believe that the earth is the center of the solar system. This last is probably still cherished by four Americans out of five."
VI
"It is never possible for a metaphysician to state his ideas in plain English. Those ideas, with few exceptions, are inherently nonsensical, and he is forced to formulate them in a vague and unintelligible jargon."
VII
"Metaphysics is a refuge for men who have a strong desire to appear learned and profound but have nothing worth hearing to say. Their speculations have helped mankind hardly more than those of the astrologers. What we regard as good in metaphysics is really psychology: the rest is only blah."
VII
"Life on this earth is not only without rational significance, but also apparently unintentional. The cosmic laws seem to have been set going for some purpose unrelated to human existence. Man is thus a sort of accidental product, as the sparks are an accidental by-product of the horseshoe a blacksmith fashions on his anvil."
VIII
"It is probably true that the advance of civilization will gradually diminish the popularity of war, but it remains doubtful that it will abolish war altogether. The Greeks, by all the standards held up by schoolmasters, were certainly civilized, and yet they fought many wars. The popes, including even some of the best popes, fought many wars."
IX
"It always takes two or three years of war, with a series of costly disasters, to set up any genuine demand for peace."
X
"The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore."
"The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens. Nearly all the whole of everyday journalism belongs to the former category: it is, in its customary aspects, no more than the reduction of vivid and recent impressions to banal sequences of time-worn words and phrases."
II
"All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence---and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence."
III
"Men are the only animals who devote themselves assiduously to making one another unhappy. It is, I suppose, one of their godlike qualities. Jahweh, as the Old Testament shows, spends a large part of His time trying to ruin the business and comfort of all other gods."
IV
"War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands."
V
"The belief that man is immortal is a vestige of the childish egoism which once made him believe that the earth is the center of the solar system. This last is probably still cherished by four Americans out of five."
VI
"It is never possible for a metaphysician to state his ideas in plain English. Those ideas, with few exceptions, are inherently nonsensical, and he is forced to formulate them in a vague and unintelligible jargon."
VII
"Metaphysics is a refuge for men who have a strong desire to appear learned and profound but have nothing worth hearing to say. Their speculations have helped mankind hardly more than those of the astrologers. What we regard as good in metaphysics is really psychology: the rest is only blah."
VII
"Life on this earth is not only without rational significance, but also apparently unintentional. The cosmic laws seem to have been set going for some purpose unrelated to human existence. Man is thus a sort of accidental product, as the sparks are an accidental by-product of the horseshoe a blacksmith fashions on his anvil."
VIII
"It is probably true that the advance of civilization will gradually diminish the popularity of war, but it remains doubtful that it will abolish war altogether. The Greeks, by all the standards held up by schoolmasters, were certainly civilized, and yet they fought many wars. The popes, including even some of the best popes, fought many wars."
IX
"It always takes two or three years of war, with a series of costly disasters, to set up any genuine demand for peace."
X
"The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore."
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