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.
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.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Related Quotes
The wise man is free from passions, not because he does not feel, but because his judgments are correct.
-- Chrysippus of Soli
The pleasant life is produced not by endless drinking and revelry but by sober reasoning.
-- Epicurus
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
-- Benedictus de Spinoza
Good sense is the most evenly distributed thing in the world.
-- René Descartes
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
-- Immanuel Kant
Have the courage to use your own understanding!
-- Immanuel Kant