Bertrand Russell Quotes

You must avoid letting anyone usurp your freedom of thought in any way, whether on religious or other grounds. People must use their minds and think and there are situations where the use of the intellect is necessary so that excessive fantasy or fancy can be held in check.

The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

Never prevent men from forming judgments according to their intellect

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

He who dares not reason, is a slave.

The power to question is the basis of all human progress.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

We must reinvent a future free of blinders so that we can choose from real options.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

Do not allow the Church or the State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.

The mind God is looking for in man is a doubting, questioning mind, not a dogmatic mind; dogmatic reasoning is wrong reasoning. Dogmatic reason ties a huge rock to a man’s foot and stops him forever from advancing.

The proper business of a University is ... not to tell us ... what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty; but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own beliefs in a manner worthy of intelligent beings.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.

A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them.

The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

Nobody has the right to shield any idea as so sacred it can’t be challenged. ... Almost all human progress is driven by people who stood up and said ‘I disagree’ with this idea that society at the time considered to be the most precious.’

... on the whole 'blasphemy' has been a force for good in human history. It is part of the process by which millions of people have come to reject theocracy and think for themselves.

Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.