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Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35 QUOTES

Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35 QUOTES

1 " The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

2 " The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

3 " [If] we wish to diminish the love of money which, we are told, is the root of all evil, the first step must be the creation of a system in which everyone has enough and no one has too much. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

4 " When men assimilate themselves to machines and value only the consequences of their work, not the work itself, style disappears, to be replaced by something which to the mechanised man appears more natural, though in fact is only more brutal. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

5 " A great deal of our modern trouble has come from mixing up romantic love, which is a poetic and anarchic impulse, with marriage, which is a social institution. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

6 " It is a curious fact that the more democratic a country becomes, the less respect it has for its rulers. Aristocracies and foreign conquerors may be hated but they are not despised. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

7 " The man who is respected merely for being the son of his father loses one of the normal incentives to useful effort. He is likely to develop views of life which attach undue importance to the accident of birth and to think that by merely existing he does enough to command respect. He believes himself rather better than other men and therefore becomes rather worse. All distinctions not based upon intrinsic merit have this bad effect upon character and on this ground, if on no other, deserve to be abolished, "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

8 " It is held that no woman can have a good moral influence unless she is or pretends to be indifferent to the male sex. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

9 " Most people learn nothing from experience except confirmation of their own prejudices. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

10 " The young, no doubt, make mistakes; but the old, when they try to think for them, make even greater mistakes. "

― Bertrand Russell , Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35