Bertrand Russell

"Monsters, presumably, are not so fearful to those who have come to terms with their own monstrosity."

"Zeal is a great quality in any walk of life, but it must be tempered with judgment."

"All the world's religions, in their descriptions of paradise for eternity, describe a place which would drive any alive and sane person mad in a week."

"The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge."

"We are not born with our beliefs; they are built up by our surroundings and our experiences."

"Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age."

"Intellectual life requires not only courage but also a high degree of honesty, both with others and with oneself."

"The average man's love of liberty is ten times more intense than his love of truth."

"It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."

"Knowledge and power are the only ends of science, and nothing else."

"A man is subversive of all order when he teaches any philosophy or religion or science which differs from that approved by the government."

"Contempt precedes contradiction; it is useless to attempt to argue with a man who despises you."

"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is the least real disagreement among the experts."

"Envy is the basis of democracy."

"Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it."

"It is impossible to be just if you only consider things from one point of view."

"The habit of accurate thought is the one habit that will benefit anybody in any walk of life."

"To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can do."

"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation."

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty."

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out."

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to prevent oneself from being imprisoned, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd."

"Science is not a collection of laws, a catalogue of unrelated facts. It is a creation of the human mind, with its freely invented ideas and concepts."

"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly."

"In all this universe of ours, where is the place of the human being? In one of the smallest, in one of the most transient, in one of the most insignificant."

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."