The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Philosophers
Bertrand Russell
Born in Britain in 1872 into the aristocratic Russell family, Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, logician, and mathematician. In the monumental Principia Mathematica, co-authored with Whitehead, he attempted to ground all of mathematics in logic and became one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Russell's Paradox revolutionized set theory; he advanced logical atomism as a philosophical method. He was also a committed anti-war and nuclear-disarmament activist. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 and sustained his intellectual combat until his death at 97.
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Bertrand Russell's Other Quotes
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Related Quotes
Behold what is absent as firmly present through the mind.
-- Parmenides
I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.
-- Socrates
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
-- Hypatia
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
-- John Locke
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
-- Bertrand Russell
Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.
-- Averroes