"[The human race], in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter."

"I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

"Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world - and never will."

"To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology."

"The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey."

"Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them."

"We cannot say much about human affairs with any confidence, but sometimes it is possible. We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war, or there won't be a world -- at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others."

"Fear makes us feel our humanity."

"Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society."

"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking."

"I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."

"Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do."

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."