Thoughts to Ponder forApril 18, 2012
All movements go too far.
Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others. ---Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)