“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

“You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. … And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.”

“To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.”

“Ideas do not make a movement; they are themselves merely the product of concrete situations, the intellectual precipitate of particular conditions of life. Movements arise only from the immediate and practical necessities of social life and are never the result of purely abstract ideas. But they acquire their irresistible force and their inner certainty of victory only when they are vitalised by a great idea, which gives them life and intellectual content.”

“What is too absurd to believe is believed because it is too absurd to be a lie.”

“One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas.”

“We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”

“The trouble with the world today is philosophical: only the right philosophy can save us. But this party plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes them with the exact opposite—with religionists, anarchists and every intellectual misfit and scum they can find—and call themselves libertarians and run for office.”

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

“The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”