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Sceptical Essays
Abstract
'These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life.' With these words Bertrand Russell introduces what is indeed a revolutionary book. Taking as his starting-point the irrationality of the world, he offers by contrast something 'wildly paradoxical and subversive' Sceptical Essays has never been out of print since its first publication in 1928. Today, besieged as we are by the numbing onslaught of twenty-first-century capitalism, Russell's defense of scepticism and independence of mind is as timely as ever. In clear, engaging prose, he guides us through the key philosophical issues that affect our daily life.
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
https://www.aamboli.com/quotes/book/sceptical-essays/9
1. "[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
2. "The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
3. "One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
4. "We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
5. "Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
6. "We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
7. "Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
8. "So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
9. "Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
10. "A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
11. "Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
12. "Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
13. "To speak seriously: the standards of "goodness" which are generally recognized by public opinion are not those which are calculated to make the world a happier place. This is due to a variety of causes, of which the chief is tradition, and the next most powerful is the unjust power of dominant classes."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
14. "Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opinion."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
15. "Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
16. "I feel as if one would only discover on one's death-bed what one ought to have lived for, and realise too late that one's life has been wasted. Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
17. "Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal" which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
18. "It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
19. "No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
20. "There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
21. "Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
22. "Men have physical needs, and they have emotions. While physical needs are unsatisfied, they take first place; but when they are satisfied, emotions unconnected with them become important in deciding whether a man is to be happy or unhappy."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
23. "Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
24. "Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said "thou shalt not," and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
25. "None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
26. "I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
27. "Very few people are able to discount the effect of circumstances upon their own characters."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
28. "We need a morality based upon love of life, upon pleasure in growth and positive achievement, not upon repression and prohibition."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
29. "If men would learn to pursue their own happiness rather than the misery of others, we can achieve a better life for everyone. Adopting this would help turn our Earth into a paradise."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
30. "The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
31. "Human nature being what it is, people will insist upon getting some pleasure out of life."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
32. "No man is fit to educate unless he feels each pupil an end in himself, with his own rights and his own personality, not merely a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, or a soldier in a regiment, or a citizen in a State. Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question but above all in education."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
33. "Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
34. "The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to those who try to remedy it."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
35. "I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
36. "Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
37. "Knowledge exists, and good will exists; but both remain impotent until they possess the proper organs for making themselves heard."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
38. "In the modern world, those whom we effectively hate are distant groups, especially foreign nations. We conceive them abstractly, and deceive ourselves into the belief that acts which are really embodiments of hatred are done from love or justice or some lofty motive. Only a large measure of skepticism can tear away the veils which hide this truth from us."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
39. "The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
40. "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."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
41. "The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
42. "The habit of considering a man’s religious, moral and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
43. "Intellectually, what is stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical importance. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to hear lectures from individualists and socialists, protectionists and free-traders, inflationists and believers in the gold standard. He ought to be encouraged to read the best books of the various schools, as recommended by those who believe in them. This would teach him to weigh arguments and evidence, to know that no pinion is certainly right, and to judge men by their quality rather than by their consonance with preconceptions."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
44. "We are accustomed to take progress for granted: to assume without hesitation that the changes which have happened during the last hundred years were unquestionably for the better, and that further changes for the better are sure to follow indefinitely."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
45. "Those who defend traditional morality will sometimes admit that it is not perfect, but contend that any criticism will make all morality crumble."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
46. "Among ourselves (Westerners), the people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forgo ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
47. "Life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other’s privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is THE moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standard different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
48. "One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected. As things stand, admiration and respect are given to the man who seems to be rich. This is the chief reason why people wish to be rich. The actual goods purchased by their money play quite a secondary part."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
49. "It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
50. "Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore, every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
51. "Our instinctive apparatus consists of two parts- the one tending to further our own life and that of our descendants, the other tending to thwart the lives of supposed rivals."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
52. "The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
53. "The need of politeness is at its maximum in speaking with foreigners, and is so irksome as to be paralysing to those who are only accustomed to compatriots."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
54. "Modesty... consists in pretending not to think better of ourselves and our belongings than of the man we are speaking to and his belongings."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
55. "Since this craving (for material possessions) is in the nature of competition, it only brings happiness when we outdistance a rival, to whom it brings correlative pain."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
56. "In the first place, there is no point whatever in being able to spell anything. Shakespeare and Milton could not spell; Marie Corelli and Alfred Austen could. Spelling is thought desirable partly for snobbish reasons, as an easy way of distinguishing the educated from the uneducated; partly, like correct clothes, as a part of herd domination; partly because the devotee of natural law feels pain in the spectacle of any sphere in which individual liberty remains."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
57. "It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone’s malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates everybody, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. (In World War I) We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think taht we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
58. "One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instruction in the prevalent forms of mendacity."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
59. "The ideal of an all-round education is out of date; it has been destroyed by the progress of knowledge."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
60. "Logic was, formerly, the art of drawing inferences; it has now become the art of abstaining from inferences, since it has appeared that the inferences we feel naturally inclined to make are hardly ever valid."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
61. "Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
62. "Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
63. "It may be laid down broadly that irrationalism, i.e., disbelief in objective fact, arises almost always from the desire to assert something for which there is no evidence, or to deny something for which there is very good evidence."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
64. "Most men think that in framing their political opinions they are actuated by desire for the public good; but 9 times out of 10 a man’s politics can be predicted from the way in which he makes a living. This has led some people to maintain, and many more to believe practically, that in such matters it is impossible to be objective, and that no method is possible except a tug-of-war between classes with opposite bias."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
65. "The bulk of the population of every country is persuaded that all marriage customs other than its own are immoral, and that those who combat this view only do so in order to justify their own loose lives."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
66. "The extent to which beliefs are based upon evidence is very much less than believers suppose. Take the kind of action which is most nearly rational: the investment of money by a rich City man. You will often find that his view (say) on the question whether the French franc will go up or down depends upon his political sympathies, and yet is so strongly held that he is prepared to risk money on it."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
67. "During the war, the holders of power in all countries found it necessary to bribe the populations into cooperation by unusual concessions. Wage-earners were allowed a living wage, Hindus were told they were men and brothers, women were given the vote, and young people were allowed to enjoy those innocent pleasures of which the old, in the name of morality, always wish to rob them. The war being won, the victors set to work to deprive their tools of advantages temporarily conceded."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
68. "The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political skeptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
69. "William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt' ... what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
70. "Politicians do not find any attractions in a view which does not lend itself to party declamation, and ordinary mortals prefer views which attribute misfortune to the machinations of their enemies."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
71. "The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the experts consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
72. "One obvious palliative of the evils of democracy in its present form would be to encourage much more publicity and initiative on the part of civil servants. They ought to have the right, and, on occasion, the duty, to frame Bills in their own names, and set forth publicly the arguments in their favor."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
73. "Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
74. "...It is necessary for the average citizen, if he wishes to make a living, to avoid incurring the hostility of certain big men. And these big men have an outlook - religious, moral, and political - with which they expect their employees to agree, at least outwardly."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
75. "The battle must be fought exactly as the battle of religious toleration was fought. And as in that case, so in this, a decay in the intensity of belief is likely to prove the decisive factor. While men were convinced of the absolute truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, as the case may be, they were willing to persecute on account of them. While men are quite certain of their modern creeds, they will persecute on their behalf. Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, thought not to the theory, of toleration."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
76. "And if happiness were common, it would preserve itself, because appeals to hatred and fear, which now constitute almost the whole of politics would fall flat."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
77. "I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
78. "In science, an observer states his results along with the probable error; but who ever heard of a theologian or a politician stating the probable error in his dogmas, or even admitting that any error is conceivable? That is because in science, where we approach nearest to real knowledge, a man can safely rely on the strength of his case, whereas, where nothing is known, blatant assertion and hypnotism are the usual ways of causing others to share our beliefs. If the fundamentalist thought they had a good case against evolution, they would not make the teaching of it illegal."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
79. "Consequently people fight for and against quite irrelevant measures, while the few who have a rational opinion are not listened to because they do not minister to any one's passions."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
80. "Will machines destroy emotions or will emotions destroy machines?"
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
81. "Nessuno può liberarsi della Paura se non osa vedere il suo posto nel mondo così com'è; nessuno può toccare la grandezza di cui pur è capace se prima non ha la forza di vedere la sua piccolezza"
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
82. "It seems that sin is geographical."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
83. "It seems that sin is geographical. From this conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of 'sin' is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practised in punishing it is unnecessary."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
