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‘My own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
‘Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’ —J.S. Mill
I consider the time devoted to the dead would be better employed in improving the conditions of the living, most of whom stand in great need of this.’
The question, then, is not whether our present civilisation will be transformed, but how will it be transformed?
The foremost truth of political economy is that everyone desires to obtain individual wealth with as little sacrifice as possible. —Nassan Senior
The fight against religion is, therefore, a direct campaign against the world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
‘Great are great because We are on knees. Let us rise!’
I am a man, and all that affects mankind concerns me.
‘The law convicts the man or woman Who steals the goose from the Common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the Common from the goose.’
The social solidarity, which Macdonald preaches, is the solidarity of the exploited with the exploiters, in other words, the maintenance of exploitation.
The man cannot be sacrificed to the machine. The machine must serve mankind, yet the danger to the human race lurks, menacing, in the Industrial Regime. — Poverty & Riches, Scott Nearing
The impatient idealist—and without some impatience, a man will hardly prove effective—is almost sure to be led into hatred by the oppositions and disappointments which he encounters in his endeavour to bring happiness to the world. —Bertrand Russell
‘Society, however, does not rest upon law. This is a legal fiction. Rather, the law must rest on society.
The first object of punishment is to satisfy the outraged law.’
People think only of preserving their child’s life; this is not enough, he must be taught to preserve his own life when he is a man, to bear the buffets of fortune, to brave wealth and poverty, to live at need among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching rocks of Malta.
Teach him to live rather than to avoid death! Life is not breath, but action! The use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in keen sense of living. A man may be buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young. —Emile
True happiness consists in decreasing the difference between our desires and our powers. —Emile
‘The aim of life is no more to control mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation hereafter, but to make the best use of it here below, and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in the actual experience of daily life;
They are called Cynics because of their morose manners. Cynicism is sometimes used to denote the contempt for human nature.
Philosophy must begin with universal scepticism. But one fact is soon found to be indubitable: the existence of a thinking principle in man. The existence of consciousness!
Great inequalities pave the way for tyranny.
What wars, crimes and horrors would have been spared to the race, if someone had exposed this imposture, and declared that the earth belonged to no one, and its fruits to all.
‘Religion is opium for mankind,’ said Marx.
