Bertrand Russell Famous Quotes

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years—who sought to use science to justify their unbelief—never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation. That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H. L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

The famous atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

As Bertrand Russell, the famous British mathematical philosopher and Nobel laureate, famously lamented in an essay condemning the rise of Nazi Germany, “the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Eliot's understanding of poetic epistemology is a version of Bradley's theory, outlined in our second chapter, that knowing involves immediate, relational, and transcendent stages or levels. The poetic mind, like the ordinary mind, has at least two types of experience: The first consists largely of feeling (falling in love, smelling the cooking, hearing the noise of the typewriter), the second largely of thought (reading Spinoza). The first type of experience is sensuous, and it is also to a great extent monistic or immediate, for it does not require mediation through the mind; it exists before intellectual analysis, before the falling apart of experience into experiencer and experienced. The second type of experience, in contrast, is intellectual (to be known at all, it must be mediated through the mind) and sharply dualistic, in that it involves a breaking down of experience into subject and object. In the mind of the ordinary person, these two types of experience are and remain disparate. In the mind of the poet, these disparate experiences are somehow transcended and amalgamated into a new whole, a whole beyond and yet including subject and object, mind and matter. Eliot illustrates his explanation of poetic epistemology by saying that John Donne did not simply feel his feelings and think his thoughts; he felt his thoughts and thought his feelings. He was able to "feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." Immediately" in this famous simile is a technical term in philosophy, used with precision; it means unmediated through mind, unshattered into subject and object. Falling in love and reading Spinoza typify Eliot's own experiences in the years in which he was writing The Waste Land. These were the exciting and exhausting years in which he met Vivien Haigh-Wood and consummated a disastrous marriage, the years in which he was deeply involved in reading F. H. Bradley, the years in which he was torn between the professions of philosophy and poetry and in which he was in close and frequent contact with such brilliant and stimulating figures as Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound, the years of the break from his family and homeland, the years in which in every area of his life he seemed to be between broken worlds. The experiences of these years constitute the material of The Waste Land. The relevant biographical details need not be reviewed here, for they are presented in the introduction to The Waste Land Facsimile. For our purposes, it is only necessary to acknowledge what Eliot himself acknowledged: the material of art is always actual life. At the same time, it should also be noted that material in itself is not art. As Eliot argued in his review of Ulysses, "in creation you are responsible for what you can do with material which you must simply accept." For Eliot, the given material included relations with and observations of women, in particular, of his bright but seemingly incurably ill wife Vivien(ne).

There is a very eloquent passage about Pascal, which deserves quotation, because it shows Nietzsche's objections to Christianity at their best: 'What is it that we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness and debility, at converting their proud assurance into anxiety and conscience-trouble; that it knows how to poison the noblest instincts and to infect them with disease, until their strength, their will to power, turns inwards, against themselves—until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt and self-immolation: that gruesome way of perishing, of which Pascal is the most famous example.

One of the most famous parts of Bacon's philosophy is his enumeration of what he calls 'idols', by which he means bad habits of mind that cause people to fall into error. Of these he enumerates four kinds. 'Idols of the tribe' are those that are inherent in human nature; he mentions in particular the habit of expecting more order in natural phenomena than is actually to be found. 'Idols of the cave' are personal prejudices, characteristic of the particular investigator. 'Idols of the market-place' are those that have to do with the tyranny of words. 'Idols of the theatre' are those that have to do with received systems of thought; of these, naturally, Aristotle and the scholastics afforded him the most noteworthy instances. Although

To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying “I have recently finished your remarkable book The American Resolution” and “have been greatly impressed with its power and insight.” The letter goes on to ask for Jimmy’s views on whether American whites “will understand the negro [sic] revolt because “the survival of mankind may well follow or fail to follow from political and social behavior of Americans in the next decades.” On September 5 Jimmy wrote back a lengthy reply saying among other things that “so far, with the exception of the students, there has been no social force in the white population which the Negroes can respect and a handful of liberals joining in a demonstration doesn’t change this one bit.” Russell replied on September 18 with more questions that Jimmy answered in an even longer letter dated December 22. Meanwhile, Russell had sent a telegram to the November 21 Town Hall meeting in New York City at which Jimmy was scheduled to speak, warning Negroes not to resort to violence. In response Jimmy said at the meeting that “I too would like to hope that the issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” but “the issues and grievances were too deeply imbedded in the American system and the American peoples so that the very things Russell warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. are ever to walk the streets as free men.” In his December 22 letter Jimmy repeats what he said at the meeting and then patiently explains to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes. The letter concludes: I believe that it is your responsibility as I believe that it is my responsibility to recognize and record this, so that in the future words do not confuse the struggle but help to clarify it. This is what I think philosophers should make clear. Because even though Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against. This exchange between Jimmy and Russell has to be seen to be believed. In a way it epitomizes the 1960s—Jimmy Boggs, the Alabama-born autoworker, explaining the responsibility of philosophers to The Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., in his time probably the West’s best-known philosopher. Within the next few years The American Revolution was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. To this day it remains a page-turner for grassroots activists because it is so personal and yet political, so down to earth and yet visionary.

Descartes, whose arguments are of just the same sort as those of early Greek philosophers, said that extension is the essence of matter, and therefore there is matter everywhere. For him, extension is an adjective, not a substantive; its substantive is matter, and without its substantive it cannot exist. Empty space, to him, is as absurd as happiness without a sentient being who is happy. Leibniz, on somewhat different grounds, also believed in the plenum, but he maintained that space is merely a system of relations. On this subject there was a famous controversy between him and Newton, the latter represented by Clarke. The controversy remained undecided until the time of Einstein, whose theory conclusively gave the victory to Leibniz. The modern physicist, while he still believes that matter is in some sense atomic, does not believe in empty space. Where there is not matter, there is still something, notably light-waves. Matter no longer has the lofty status that it acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides. It is not unchanging substance, but merely a way of grouping events. Some events belong to groups that can be regarded as material things; others, such as light-waves, do not. It is the events that are the stuff of the world, and each of them is of brief duration. In this respect, modern physics is on the side of Heraclitus as against Parmenides. But it was on the side of Parmenides until Einstein and quantum theory.

The Monday meetings were in a sense a tug-of-war, in which the Schlick faction—supposedly in the name of his mentors, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell—sought to drag their master over the demarcation line of the “verification criterion” (Schlick: “The meaning of an assertion lies in the method of its verification”), while a famously indefatigable Wittgenstein held his ground at the other end of the rope with Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard, waiting for the whole positivist troop to collapse.

Bertrand Russell noted this in a famous article, writing emphatically that “The law of causality . . . is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

The Natural Law Argument Bertrand Russell: “There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice, you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design.” Russell's argument is a logical fallacy because we cannot impose our understanding and interpretation of playing dice on God or the natural law. We must first define or understand our subject to talk about anything with scientific precision. Since nobody has an understanding of the world before the world, to put it that way, we cannot have a clear understanding or grasp of the things that are beyond our cognitive powers. We still can think about them. To say that science is only what is proven by scientific experiments would be foolish because that would exclude the vast space of the unknown, even unknowable. Maybe God does not play dice, but maybe even God needs, metaphorically speaking, to throw out thirty-six worlds to make some effects, even if only two, that would otherwise not be possible. As we know, matter cannot power itself and organize itself without the underlying creative force empowering it. Matter is matter thanks to our perceptive and cognitive powers, not per se. Matter per se does not exist in the form we see it. What we see is a reality based on our senses. We cannot completely rely on our senses to tell the underlying reality. Reaching the underlying reality is possible only through abstract thought. This abstract thought will enhance scientific discoveries because we cannot reach the physically unreachable by experiments or strictly scientific means. Identification of God from religious books with God independent of holy books is prevalent in the books or arguments against God used by the most famous atheists, including agnostics like Bertrand Russell. However, a huge difference exists between a God from religious books and Spinoza’s God or the God of many philosophers and scientists. Once we acknowledge and accept this important difference, we will realize that the gap between believers (not contaminated by religions) and atheists (or agnostics) is much smaller than it looks at first sight. God is not in the religious books, nor can he be owned through religious books. The main goal of the major monotheistic religions is to a priori appropriate and establish the right to God rather than to define and explain God in the deepest possible sense because that is almost impossible, even for science and philosophy. For that reason, a belief in blind faith and fear mostly saves major religions, rather than pure belief, unaffected by religious influence or deceit.