Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), full name Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British mathematician, philosopher, and logician. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.Wisdom & Quotes
- I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. ... But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
- Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver in the end, the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a spender of their own.
- The most savage controversies are about those matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
- Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
- Government can easily exist without law, but law cannot exist without government.
- Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
- The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
- Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.
- Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
- Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
- Marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
- The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress.
- Civilised people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
- Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
- Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.
- To realize the unimportance of time is the gate 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.
- Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge.
- The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
- If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
Calvin Coolidge