The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
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.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
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.
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
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.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
