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"All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy."
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"[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell."

"In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics."

"You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application."

"The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved."

"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery."

"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."

"Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached."
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