"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
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Bertrand Russell quotes (page 11 of 60)
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"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own."
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"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."
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"To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century."
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"Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure."
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"Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety."
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"Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety."
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"For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience."
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"...I am afraid that education is conceived more in terms of indoctrination by most school officials than in terms of enlightenment. My own belief is that education must be subversive if it is to be meaningful. By this I mean that it must challenge all the things we take for granted, examine all accepted assumptions, tamper with every sacred cow, and instill a desire to question and doubt. Without this the mere instruction to memorise data is empty. The attempt to enforce conventional mediocrity on the young is criminal."
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"To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy."
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"There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less."
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"The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique."
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"Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."
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"At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess."
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"Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel."
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"A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime."
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"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."
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"Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good."
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"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."
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"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."
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