Celia Elizabeth Green (born 26 November 1935) is a British writer on philosophical skepticism and psychology.
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
Young people wonder how the adult world can be so boring. The secret is that it is not boring to adults because they have learnt to enjoy simple things like covert malice at one another's expense.
Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.
Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail.
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.
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.
If you stand up to the human race you lose something called their 'goodwill'; if you kowtow to them you gain. . . their permission to continue kowtowing.
When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.
What appear to be the most valuable aspects of the theoretical physics we have are the mathematical descriptions which enable us to predict events. These equations are, we would argue, the only realities we can be certain of in physics; any other ways we have of thinking about the situation are visual aids or mnemonics which make it easier for beings with our sort of macroscopic experience to use and remember the equations.
People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.
The charms of money are distinctly under-represented in literature. There are no songs or poems extolling its virtues. This seems on the face of it strange. The claims of money to be celebrated in verse might well seem to be no less than those of faithful dogs, beautiful women, or jugs of wine.
The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.
It is easier to study the 'behavior' of rats than people, because rats are smaller and have fewer outside commitments. So modern psychology is mostly about rats
The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.
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.
The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.
Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty.
A narrow mind and a wide mouth usually go together.
It is superfluous to be humble on one's own behalf; so many people are willing to do it for one.
The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.