I want to know how God created the world. I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.

The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

There is, however, one other human right which is infrequently mentioned but which seems to be destined to become very important: this is the right, or the duty, of the individual to abstain from cooperating in activities which he considers wrong or pernicious.

I am an absolute pacifist ... It is an instinctive feeling. It is a feeling that possesses me, because the murder of men is disgusting.

... we will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

The state is made for man, not man for the state.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

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