The word 'education' means 'leading out'. To execution, perhaps.

 Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail.

Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

Astonishment is the only realistic emotion.

The fact that something is far-fetched is no reason why it should not be true; it cannot be as far-fetched as the fact that something exists.

It is axiomatic that the importance of a given thing cannot be determined by the number of people who are prepared to admit that it is important.

In the light of absolute uncertainty, possibilities are facts and emotions are actions.

The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

People accept their limitations so as to prevent themselves from wanting anything they might get.

The depth of human suffering is the measure of the aversion which the human mind has for reality.

It is inconceivable that anything should be existing. It is not inconceivable that a lot of people should also be existing who are not interested in the fact that they exist. But it is certainly very odd.

There is nothing so relaxing as responsibility; nor any relief from strain so great as that which comes of recognising one's own importance.

All the prisoners are so sensible. They wouldn't use a file in case they cut themselves.

No one says: The infinite is infinitely important; nothing in the world is more than finite, therefore it is easy to act uncompromisingly. The nearest they get to this is: Nothing is very important, so there is no point in being uncompromising.

The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.

The object of modern science is to make all aspects of reality equally boring, so that no one will be tempted to think about them.

If you say to a theoretical physicist that something is inconceivable, he will reply: 'It only appears inconceivable because you are naively trying to conceive it. Stop thinking and all will be well.'

The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.

When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.

Philosophy should not teach you to be mistrustful of meta-physical questions, but of metaphysical answers. The unjustified assumptions which underlie the procedures of commonsense are at least as suspect as those which tell you how many angels can be placed on the point of a needle.

Philosophy thinks it has discovered that there are no absolutes.
It has actually discovered that human beings have no way of being sure what is absolute.

What everyone has against Ludwig of Bavaria is not that he ruined Bavaria but that he supported a genius in the process.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

If you stand up to the human race you lose something called their 'goodwill'; if you kowtow to them you gain . . . their per-mission to continue kowtowing.

Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.

It is very easy to make someone into a failure; you have only to prevent them from being a success.

It is superfluous to be humble on one's own behalf; so many people are willing to do it for one.

If the human race would take death seriously there would be no more of it.

Equality: It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them appear equally clever.

In the days of patronage by individuals you had to be dishonest to your patron; in the days of patronage by committees you have to be dishonest to everybody.

Democracy: everyone should have an equal opportunity to obstruct everybody else.

When people talk about 'the sanctity of the individual' they mean 'the sanctity of the statistical norm'.

The difference between an earned and unearned income—an unearned income might enable someone to do something; an earned income is a guarantee that he is wasting his time.

In an unenlightened society some people are forced to play degrading social roles; in an enlightened society, everyone is.

Only a hereditary aristocrat can be expected to recognise the confidence of genius; a plebeian or another genius would be too jealous.

The socially-disapproved attitudes are attitudes which it is possible to get wrong; the socially-approved attitudes are attitudes which it is impossible to get right.

I wouldn't expect society to recognise ability, but it might leave a few loop-holes for it.

In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy, a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way.

You may despise fame; but if you do, you must despise the opinions of your neighbours.

Society is everybody's way of punishing one another because they daren't take it out on the universe.

'The Sabbath was made for man. And the universe too.' •

'Social justice'—the expression of universal hatred.

'Society is for man and man for society.'

War is a very good way of lowering the standard of living so that everyone has to concentrate on keeping alive. If they do have thoughts about reality, they won't have time to write them down.

Society is a self-regulating mechanism for preventing the fulfilment of its members.

I cannot write long books; I leave that for those who have nothing to say.

The mature person never tells the truth when a lie will do.
The human race is so megalomaniac; they think you're being conceited if you say you're better than everybody else.

Human nature: vindictiveness lightly coated with dishonesty.

A human relationship is what happens when you know you can rely on the other person to be as dishonest as you are.

Psychotics frequently invert the truth about themselves. E.g.: 'It's love that makes the world go round.' (It's hatred that makes the world stay put.)

It is not so much that people don't want other people to have advantages; they want them not to have advantages.

The human race does not have much imagination, or (what comes to the same thing) much appreciation of reality.

It is impossible to be certain that any part of your experience is not a hallucination, or that any step in your thinking is not erroneous.

The human race believes in not taking its problems seriously enough to solve them.

If anyone says ethical values are supremely important, you may be sure he hasn't any.

People having religions is an insult to the universe.

The desire to maintain an uncritical belief in the reality of the external world is a source of emotional disturbance which leads to irrationality and restriction of function.

On marriage: I can think of less painful ways of committing suicide.

If you think of women as human, they are exasperating on account of their incredible feebleness; of course, it's all right if you don't think of them as human at all.

People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

A girls' school is a school for domestic servants.

Women are like sane people in general—you can't imagine how they can bear to be like it but the last thing they want is to be told how to stop.

The object of the educational system is to make the child feel suitably guilty for the harm that has been done to him.

Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society.

The word 'education' means 'leading out'. To execution, perhaps.

Women are the last people to be trusted with children. Those who have repressed their own aspirations will scarcely be tolerant of the aspirations of others.

If my education taught me one thing it was this: that if you are ever in a tight corner you can expect everybody to ton on you with all they've got. This is an infallible law of sane psychology. 

There are some things that are sure to go wrong as soon as they stop going right.

The human race appears to cultivate feeble-mindedness. But this feeble-mindedness is not applied indiscriminately.

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is lucky to escape with his life.

I decided to postulate infinitely many dimensions on grounds of economy of hypotheses.

A committee may be less likely than an individual to misuse funds; the question is whether it is equally likely to use them.

What is scandalous is not that stupid people should sometimes inherit private incomes; but that clever people should sometimes not.

The human race knows enough about thinking to prevent it.

Modern Definitions: 'Thinking is words, consciousness is behaviour, experiment is measurement.'

One of the greatest superstitions of our time is the belief that it has none.

Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty.

A hundred trained people will never add up to one motivated one.

When you point out things which the human race has been carefully ignoring for centuries, on account of deep-seated emotional resistances, the expected outcome is not instant acclamation.

It is one of the major achievements of the human race that as its control of its environment increases, everyone becomes more— not less—immersed in the material.

That society exists to frustrate the individual may be seen from its attitude to work. It is only morally acceptable if you do not want to do it. If you do want to, it becomes a personal pleasure.

The most I ask of society is that it should express the will of the majority in a blind and imperfect manner. That would at least give one a sporting chance of survival.

Earning a living is regarded as moral. This is because a person who is answerable only to himself may or may not be wasting his time; an employed person is certain to be.

When the French Revolution decided to guillotine Lavoisier, he asked for a fortnight's grace to finish some experiments. The reply was that the Republic had no need of such things. The guillotining of Lavoisier was the true objective of the Revolution. It desired to destroy him so much that it was prepared incidentally to destroy any number of less intellectual persons en route.

We five in an age when humanity believes in itself. It believes in itself very thoroughly indeed. It is the beginning and the end to itself, its own solution to every problem. Humanity knows that philosophy was made by it, and religion was made by it, and society was made by it. In fact, reality was made by it. For (thus runs the reasoning) the agreement of a multiplicity of persons is the cri-terion we adopt for reality. There is no other criterion for deter-mining reality. There is no other sense in which the word 'reality' can be used. Therefore reality is what a collection of people agree to call by this name.

Thus Newton: 'It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact. . . . That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act on another, at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who in philosophical matters has a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.' It is, if you give it a little thought, equally inconceivable that brute matter should operate upon and affect other matter with mutual contact. It does not seem so simply be-cause, in the course of your life, you have become familiar with certain strange ways of affecting your environment called 'pulling' and 'pushing' things.

Adler once said that a genius is a person who contributes the most to the welfare of the human race. An unrecognised genius is impossible. So much for the compassion of Adler. There are no prisoners in the Bastille. Prisoners in the Bastille do not exist.
So much, also, for Adler's powers of analytical thought. Re-defining a word does not annihilate its original meaning. You could define geniuses as people of high ability who wanted to use it (for example). If you say a crow is not a large black bird, but a small white animal that says baa, the species originally known as crows goes on living in the world with all their problems intact, even if these problems are quite different from those of woolly lambs.

Psychology used to deal with introspection. We have decided that introspective reports are unreliable. (So they are—sane people don't practise introspection hard enough to become accurate.) The conclusion was that we would abandon the study of introspection and study only 'behaviour'. It is easier to study the 'behaviour' of rats than people, because rats are smaller and have fewer outside commitments. So modern psychology is mostly about rats.

Adler suggested that the best guide to what a person was actually motivated to bring about was provided by a study of his life-style—i.e. a study of the situations that recurred in his life— rather than of what he said he was aiming at.
This principle might be applied to collective entities such as organisations, societies, and the human race in toto. There is no need to postulate a group subconscious in order to do this. The combined subconscious motivation of the individual members is quite sufficient to produce a resultant nexus of forces which will permit certain developments and not others.
It is then clear that the history of the human race is to be under-stood as a prolonged effort not to gain control of its environment.

Tugging hard at its boodaces, the human race resists with moral indignation any suggestion that it might walk instead. 'Want us to stay here for ever, don't you,' it says, puffing away.

Celia Green

from the book The decline and fall of science