Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), “Introduction” (p. xiii)
"Irish Essays. Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes" (1882)
Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Duty of Inquiry
Context: A bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards. Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide. But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent. If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should lose its property, but that it should become a den of thieves, for then it must cease to be society. This is why we ought not to do evil, that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby. In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
In a speech on Democratic Development, Pluralism and Civil Society delivered at the Nobel Institute, Oslo, Norway (7 April 2005). http://www.akdn.org/speech/nobel-institute-oslo
Jörg Immendorff (1976), as cited in: William Packer. " Obituary: Jörg Immendorff http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2101396,00.html," The Guardian, 13 June 2007
“The human spirit, driven by an invincible force, will never cease to ask: What is beyond?”
Discours de réception de Louis Pasteur (1882)
Context: The human spirit, driven by an invincible force, will never cease to ask: What is beyond? Does he want to stop either in time or in space? Since the point at which he has reigned is only a finite magnitude, greater only than all those who have preceded him, he has scarcely begun to think of it as the implacable question and always without being able to silence his curiosity. There is nothing to answer: there are spaces, times or magnitudes without limits. No one understands these words. <!-- He who proclaims the existence of the infinite, and no one can escape from it accumulates in this affirmation more supernatural than there is in all the miracles of all religions; for the notion of the infinite has the double character of imposing itself and of being incomprehensible.
"Down the River", p. 148
Desert Solitaire (1968)
The Next Ten Years in Economic and Social Policy (1929), p. 46
