What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and compassion over rigid belief systems.
Bertrand Russell argues that rather than adhering strictly to dogmas or unchallenged beliefs, what the world truly requires is a mindset rooted in scientific inquiry. Addressing the moral implications of suffering caused by both human and divine actions, he advocates for a compassionate approach that values human dignity and questions the justification of suffering, regardless of its source.
In practice
In a discussion about human rights, this quote serves as a reminder to question oppressive ideologies.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
There is a history in all men's lives.
What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science.
In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.
The nature of man is such that people consider themselves put under an obligation as much by the benefits they confer as by those they receive.
all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.
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