Bertrand Russell Quotes

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.

We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.

But you can't focus on things that matter if all you've been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know.

Belief is the death of intelligence.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

You can always get someone to do your thinking for you.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well.

Worship God. It’s easier than thinking.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death.

Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

A high standard of living is usually accompanied by a low standard of thinking.

Most people wish to be consoled, confirmed. They want their prejudices reinforced and their structured belief systems validated. After all, it hurts to think, and it's absolute agony to think twice.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

There are many people out there who don't even think of themselves as being averse to facts, but the truth is, they are not getting it.

The need for certainty is the greatest disease the Mind faces

We always plan too much and always think too little. We resent a call to thinking and hate unfamiliar argument that does not tally with what we already believe or would like to believe.