Bertrand Russell

“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.”

“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.”

“Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.”

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

“It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.”

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

“Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.”

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”

“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

“To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.”

“I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.”

“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.”

“Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.”

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”

“The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.”

“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.”

“Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”

“Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.”

“Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.”

“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.”