It will always remain incomprehensible that our generation, which has shown itself so great by its discoveries and inventions, could fall so low in the realms of thought.

that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world — not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them.

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that
certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.
Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other
over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything — anything — be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous
than the world we are living in.

the strange ideas we derive today will one day be our celebrated truths

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.

it is really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming, in a rather special sense, stupid.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

I think our hopes are made when we are young, and we can never adjust them to the real world.

It was doubtful that their technology, and its intelligent use, would ever match their ability to create social stupidities.

...a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of the mind always too degenerate and never to advance.