"I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race."

"Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls."

"That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."

"...a science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the destribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life."

"...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night."

"Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them."

"Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent."

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."

"Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference."

"The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek."

"Be wiser than other people, if you can, but do not tell them so."

"A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective."

"We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists."

"No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping."

"Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development."

"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches?"

"When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat."

"The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might; to eat with apple tart."