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
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.
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.
Related Quotes
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
-- Hypatia
Behold what is absent as firmly present through the mind.
-- Parmenides
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
-- Stephen Hawking
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
The bulls might be right that the company's accounting is fine, but they're asking us to take it on faith. We prefer to verify.
-- David Einhorn