Shocking Sayings

The snake that cannot shed its skin must die. It must shed its mind along with its skin.

And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so delicate! We are all of us fine sumpter asses and assesses.

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

What does Europe owe to the Jews? Many things both good and bad, and one thing above all, at once the best and the worst: the grand moral style, the horror and the majesty of everlasting demands, everlasting meanings, the whole sublime romanticism of…

I hate the world and almost all the people in it.

I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.

The only thing that I strongly feel worthwhile would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world.

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

I should not hold it desirable that either a man or a woman should enter upon the serious business of a marriage intended to lead to children without having had previous sexual experience.

It seems on the whole fair to regard Negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from the question of humanity) would be highly undesirable.

There are three ways of securing a society that shall be stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that of general misery except for a powerful minority.

War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freel…

Our nominal morality has been formulated by priests and mentally enslaved women. It is time that men who have to take a normal part in the normal life of the world learned to rebel against this sickly nonsense.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.