Bertrand Russell

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

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

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

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

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.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

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.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

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

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

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.

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.