Russell, Bertrand

"Your life is shaped by the way you think about it."

"The only thing that stands between man and extinction is imagination."

"Firm adherence to equal rights means the abolition of special privileges."

"We have in fact lost that which all religions agree in teaching, that we are made in the image of God."

"Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos."

"One of the great advantages of a writer's life is that it is a good cure for boredom."

"Humans are emotional, not logical creatures."

"The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be."

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

"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 parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand."

"The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice."

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite of the will to believe."

"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."

"The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy."

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

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

"Humans cannot bear to live without meaning, and in our modern age we have lost the traditional meanings that religion provided."

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

"The greatest intellectual capacity is the capacity to be puzzled."

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion."

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty."

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

"Conquer the world by meditation."

"A man should live so that he is ashamed of nothing in his past, proud of his present, and hopeful about his future."

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."

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

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."