“Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us.”

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”

“The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.”

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”

“Brief is this existence, as a visit in a strange house. The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.”

“The most amazing thing about the world is that we understand it.”

“The most important question a person can ask is, "Is the Universe a friendly place?”

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth”

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.”

“Die Welt wird nicht bedroht von den Menschen, die böse sind, sondern von denen, die das Böse zulassen.”

“The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.”

“I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.”

“The tendencies we have mentioned are something new for America. They arose when, under the influence of the two World Wars and the consequent concentration of all forces on a military goal, a predominantly military mentality developed, which with the almost sudden victory became even more accentuated. The characteristic feature of this mentality is that people place the importance of what Bertrand Russell so tellingly terms “naked power” far above all other factors which affect the relations between peoples. The Germans, misled by Bismarck’s successes in particular, underwent just such a transformation of their mentality—in consequence of which they were entirely ruined in less than a hundred years. I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and I know that, independent of me, this analogy has most painfully occurred to others as well. It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts—in short, the psychological factors—are considered as unimportant and secondary. Herein lies a certain resemblance to Marxism, at least insofar as its theoretical side alone is kept in view. The individual is degraded to a mere instrument; he becomes “human materiel.” The normal ends of human aspiration vanish with such a viewpoint. Instead, the military mentality raises “naked power” as a goal in itself—one of the strangest illusions to which men can succumb.”

“The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a simple datum of experience.”

“the only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats...”