Bertrand Russell Quotes

If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

if reason ruled the world would history even exist?

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?

Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

There is no greater monster than reason.

We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.

Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about

The difference between faith and superstition is that the first uses reason to go as far as it can, and then makes the jump; the second shuns reason entirely — which is why superstition is not the ally, but the enemy, of true religion.

Monsters are the result of the sleep of reason.

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.

When people disagreed with him he urged them to be objective.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.