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*I should wish to see a
world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning
the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them
through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.
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-Bertrand Russell
Preface to
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
Paul Edwards, ed.
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*I am as firmly convinced
that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
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-Bertrand Russell
Preface to Why I Am Not a Christian, and
other essays on religion and related subjects, 1957
Paul Edwards, ed.
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*What really moves people to
believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. 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, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look
after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desires
for a belief in God.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Why I Am Not a Christian", "The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice"
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6, 1927
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*I know a parson who
frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming
was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found out that
he was planting trees in his garden.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Why I Am Not a Christian", "Defects in Christ's Teaching"
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6, 1927
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*The teaching of
Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do
with the ethics of Christians.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?", 1930
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6, 1927
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*It is not that their
[animals and humans] environment was made to be suitable to them but that they
grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Why I Am Not a Christian", "The Argument from Design"
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6, 1927
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*[E]ven if it is enormously
improbable that the laws of chance will produce an organism capable of
intelligence out of a casual selection of atoms, it is nevertheless probable
that there will be in the universe that very small number of such organisms
that we do in fact find.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?", "The Objections to
Religion", 1930
Paul Edwards, ed.
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*[T]here is to me something
a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an
omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by
many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately
rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H-bomb.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Why I Am Not a Christian", "What We Must Do"
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6, 1927
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*Do you think that, if you
were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to
perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan
or the Fascists?
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Why I Am Not a Christian", "The Argument from Design"
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6, 1927
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*We want to stand upon our
own feet and look fair and square at the world-its good facts, its bad facts,
its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of
it.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Why I Am Not a Christian", "What We Must Do"
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6, 1927
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*As soon as absolute truth
is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body
of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire
power, since they hold the key to truth.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?", 1930
Paul Edwards, ed.
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*[I]t is worth while to
observe that the modern doctrines as to minute phenomena have no bearing
upon anything that is of practical importance.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?", "Sources of
Intolerance", 1930
Paul Edwards, ed.
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*Religion is based, I
think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the
unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a
kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and
disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing---fear of the mysterious,
fear of defeat, fear of death.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not A Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Why I Am Not a Christian", "Fear, the Foundation of Religion"
Paul Edwards, ed.
Originally presented as a lecture at the Battersea Town Hall, March 6,
1927
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*[T]he latest doctrines
of the atom. . .tend to show that the physical laws in which we have
hitherto believed have only an approximate and average truth as applied
to large numbers of atoms, while the individual electron behaves pretty
much as it likes. My own belief is that this is a temporary phase, and
that the physicists will in time discover laws governing minute phenomena,
although these laws may differ very considerably from those of traditional
physics.
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-Bertrand Russell
Why I Am Not a Christian, and other essays
on religion and related subjects, 1957
"Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?", "Sources of
Intolerance", 1930
Paul Edwards, ed.
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~So far as I can remember,
there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
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-Bertrand Russell
"Education and the Social Order"
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~The fact that an opinion
has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;
indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread
belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
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-Bertrand Russell
Marriage and Morals, 1929
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The Christian view that all intercourse outside
marriage was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the
view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A
view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded
by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in
Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force
tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
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-Bertrand Russell
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Simpson succeeded in proving that there was
no harm in giving anesthetics to man, because God put Adam into a deep sleep
when He extracted his rib. But male ecclesiastics remained unconvinced as
regards the sufferings of women, at any rate in childbirth.
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-Bertrand Russell
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The degree of one's emotion varies inversely
with one's knowledge of the facts--the less you know the hotter you get.
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-Bertrand Russell
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Organic life, we are told, has developed
gradually from the protozoan to the philosopher, and this development, we are
assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not
the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
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-Bertrand Russell
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To be without some of the things you want is
an indispensable part of happiness.
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-Bertrand Russell
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The secret of happiness is this: Let your
interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and
persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
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-Bertrand Russell
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The secret to happiness is to face the fact
that the world is horrible.
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-Bertrand Russell
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The free intellect is the chief engine of
human progress.
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-Bertrand Russell
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It is only the intellect that keeps me sane;
perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.
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-Bertrand Russell
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The main thing needed to make men happy is
intelligence.
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-Bertrand Russell
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Because language is misleading, as well as
because it is diffuse and inexact when applied to logic (for which it was
never intended), logical symbolism is absolutely necessary to any exact or
thorough treatment of our subject.
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-Bertrand Russell
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Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be
killed for trivial reasons.
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-Bertrand Russell
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Home
(This is a test effort. The text is copyrighted, I took it from Biography.com. This
will not be the final version of the text I use.)
Philosopher and mathematician, born in Trelleck, Monmouthshire,
SE Wales, UK. He studied at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Trinity College in
1895. Concerned to defend the objectivity of mathematics, he pointed out a contradiction
in Frege's system, published his own Principles of Mathematics (1903), and collaborated
with A N Whitehead in Principia mathematica (1910--13). In 1907 he offered himself as a
Liberal candidate, but was turned down for his "free-thinking'. In 1916 his pacifism lost
him his fellowship (restored in 1944), and in 1918 he served six months in prison. From
the 1920s he lived by lecturing and journalism, and became increasingly controversial. He
visited the Soviet Union, was professor at Peking (1920--1), and with his wife started a
progressive school near Petersfield (1927). He succeeded to his brother's title in 1931.
The evils of Fascism led him to renounce pacifism in 1939. Later works included An Enquiry
into Meaning and Truth (1940) and Human Knowledge (1948). After 1949 he became a champion
of nuclear disarmament, and engaged in unprecedented correspondence with several world
leaders. One of the most important influences on 20th-c analytic philosophy, he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, and wrote an Autobiography (1967--69) remarkable
for its openess and objectivity.
