For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

Time is the wave upon the shore. It takes some things away, but it brings other things.

Do not let us speak of darker days let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.

Organized people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.

Surgeon General's warning ought to read: Smoking has been determined t0 cause cancer, heart disease & rednecks with seniority.

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal.

I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

There was only one catch and that was catch 22

College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

In every height, man feels himself in the low; because man is greedy and unsatisfied!