The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts ‘sins’ and others ‘virtue’ on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.
Bertrand Russell Quotes
We must be skeptical even of our skepticism.
The skepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a […]
No man treats a car as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say ‘you are a wicked motorcar and I shall not give you any more petroleum until you go.’ He attempts to find out what […]
Sin is geographical.
Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced.
There is – in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times – I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejected, because it is bound up with modern technique; it is essential alike to prosperity in peace and to victory in war. That is, perhaps from an intellectual point […]
He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often.
Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
