W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

There is nothing sooner overthrows a weak head than opinion by authority, like too strong a liquor for a frail glass.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave.

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

Belief is the death of intelligence.

Honest investigation is utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason, that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and if you think it wrong, the church will investigate you.

Dogma is less useful than cow dung. One can make whatever one likes out of it …

There are certain catchwords which have a marvelous charm to calm the breast political, a magic power to levitate the mind captivated by them, out of the regions of mere argument and recognition of facts. Such a hold do these words and the deified abstractions they cover have on the average man of the nineteenth century, that they and they alone are worshipped as the ultimate manifestation of goodness, beauty, and truth. To be opposed to these abstractions is to be condemned as blasphemous against the first principles of rectitude, moral and political.

Every reactionary lacks intellectual independence.

Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

If you attach your mind to any ideology, you're going to be on a road, and that road may or may not lead you in a good direction. But you're gonna stay on that road because you are attached to an ideology. It could be a terrible road, but you stick with it regardless of rational thinking.

[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be.

We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.