{"quotes":[{"text":"I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life -- in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice.","author":"Frank Sinatra","tags":["albert-einstein","atheism","belief","bertrand-russell","evidence","naturalism","nature"],"id":2359,"author_id":"Frank+Sinatra"},{"text":"...What about the stone, Mr Lovegood? The thing you call the Resurrection Stone?'What of it?'Well, how can that be real?'Prove that it is not,' said Xenophilius.Hermione looked out.","author":"J.K. Rowling","tags":["agnosticism","atheism","bertrand-russell","burden-of-proof","celestial-teapot","logic","reasoning"],"id":75667,"author_id":"J.K.+Rowling"},{"text":"Among the objections to the reality of objects of sense, there is one which is derived from the apparent difference between matter as it appears in physics and things as they appear in sensation. Men of science, for the most part, are willing to condemn immediate data as 'merely subjective,' while yet maintaining the truth of the physics inferred from those data. But such an attitude, though it may be *capable* of justification, obviously stands in need of it; and the only justification possible must be one which exhibits matter as a logical construction from sense-data―unless, indeed, there were some wholly *a priori* principle by which unknown entities could be inferred from such as are known. It is therefore necessary to find some way of bridging the gulf between the world of physics and the world of sense, and it is this problem which will occupy us in the present lecture. Physicists appear to be unconscious of the gulf, while psychologists, who are conscious of it, have not the mathematical knowledge required for spanning it. The problem is difficult, and I do not know its solution in detail. All that I can hope to do is to make the problem felt, and to indicate the kind of methods by which a solution is to be sought.'―from_Our Knowledge of the External World_, p. 107.","author":"Betrand Russell","tags":["bertrand-russell","metaphysics","philosophy","physics"],"id":76768,"author_id":"Betrand+Russell"},{"text":"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.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["bertrand-russell","fear","thought"],"id":88850,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"I remember the philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked why he spent his time protesting against nuclear war and getting arrested on demonstrations. Why didn’t he continue to work on the serious philosophical and logical problems which have major intellectual significance? And his answer was pretty good. He said: “Look, if I and others like me only work on those problems, there won’t be anybody around to appreciate it or be interested.","author":"Chomsky Noam","tags":["activism","bertrand-russell"],"id":141370,"author_id":"Chomsky+Noam"},{"text":"The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["atheist","bertrand-russell","infinite","searching"],"id":156081,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. 'I think, therefore I am' says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["bertrand-russell","continuity","descartes","existence","existentialism","experience","self","thought","uncertainty"],"id":159392,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["alcohol","bertrand-russell","reason","sin"],"id":161271,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["bertrand-russell","insight","intelligence","philosophy","tolerance","wisdom"],"id":163426,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["argument-from-design","bertrand-russell","god","moon","philosophy","religion","russell","why-i-am-not-a-christian"],"id":252949,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}