Q - Bertrand Russell
Posted on 14th March 2021
Bertrand Arthur William Russell 1872 - 1970 was a British philosopher, mathematician, writer, historian and political activist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.
‘The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge’
‘Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination’
‘Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons’
‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead’
‘Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom’
‘Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know’
‘There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it’
‘The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it’
‘I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong’
‘Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric’
‘The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time’
‘There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge’
‘Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure’
‘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’
‘Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government’
‘It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly’
‘Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities’
‘The most savage controversies are about those matters as to which there is no good evidence either way’
‘Only in thought is man a God, in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance’
‘One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected’
‘To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom’
‘As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles’
‘Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery’
‘No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other’
‘A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live’
‘A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand’
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