Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRSwas a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense". He was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth18 May 1872
Every increase in knowledge requires an increase in wisdom
The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.
Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
The essence of education is that it is a change effected in the organism to satisfy the operator.
Only six need be attempted.
Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.
Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.
The whole realm of thought and opinion is utterly unsuited to public control; it ought to be as free, and as spontaneous as is possible. The state is justified in insisting that children shall be educated, but it is not justified in forcing their education to proceed on a uniform plan and to be directed to the production of a dead level of glib uniformity.
It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.
Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.
Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.
I FIND IT SO DIFFICULT NOT TO HATE, WHEN I DO NOT HATE I FEEL WE FEW ARE SO LONELY IN THE WORLD
One of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence
If the Church is not now as bad as the Soviet Government, that is due to the influence of those who attacked the Church