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Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn't follow their religion would be tortured for eternity.

Bertrand Russell

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Bertrand Russell
Age: 97 †
Born: 1872
Born: May 18
Died: 1970
Died: February 2
Analytic Philosopher
Autobiographer
Epistemologist
Essayist
Journalist
Logician
Mathematician
Metaphysician
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Tryleg
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Russell
Bertrand Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Bertrand Russell
Earl Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
3rd Earl Russell
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Religion
Sacrifice
Enjoy
Fervent
Didn
Follow
Tortured
Body
Instead
Believers
Mind
Joy
Pleasures
Would
Knowing
Believer
Men
Pleasure
Eternity
Religious

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Logic must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can.
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Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.
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Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
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It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
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I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of that joy. ... I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
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There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.
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Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens.
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I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.
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A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.
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Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.
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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
Bertrand Russell
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War doesn't determine who's right, it determines who's left
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Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.
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The first step in wisdom, as well as in morality, is to open the windows of the ego as wide as possible.
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Modern definitions of truth, such as those as pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialisation as opposed to aristocracy.
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It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.
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My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
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What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry.
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The Eugenic Society . . . is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.
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I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
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