Russell, Bertrand

"We want to stand on our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its uglinesses; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it."

"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."

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

"The person susceptible to religious experience is one who experiences the world as somehow divine."

"One of the greatest evils of our time is the false belief that a thing which has been held to be right for a thousand years must be right still."

"Thinking is difficult, that is why so few people do it."

"The question of free will is one of the most important from a philosophical standpoint, yet it has been exhaustively discussed without any approach to unanimous opinion."

"I realize that the human heart is the same everywhere, and those in the same social circumstances will have much the same joys and sorrows."

"It should be the whole endeavor of science to simplify experience while preserving its essential features."

"I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing means of peacefully and forcefully registering itself."

"Of all the things that drive men to philosophy, the desire to understand the nature of human happiness is perhaps the strongest."

"The right to doubt is the foundation of all science."

"A society in which the majority has the power to impose its own conception of the good life on minorities is not free."

"Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness that afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives."

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Only the wise can be certain of their uncertainty."

"I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a form of rebellion."

"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."

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

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

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to prevent one's children from being turned out of school, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"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."

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

"Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality; that sensible material things are merely the interpretation, the conversion of mathematical entities into sensible form."

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

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

"Cruelty to animals is incompatible with genuine education and morality."

"Most men would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."

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