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Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.

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
Based
Authority
Humanistic
Principles
Criterion
Virtue
Transcending
Humans
Criteria
Ethics
Principle
Determine

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Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
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Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
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The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
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Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.
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Cruel men believe in a cruel god and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly god, and they would be kindly in any case.
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The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.
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Answering questions is a major part of sex education. Two rules cover the ground. First, always give a truthful answer to a question secondly, regard sex knowledge as exactly like any other knowledge.
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Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
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The newspapers at one time said that I was dead but after carefully examining the evidence I came to the conclusion that this statement was false.
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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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In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap.
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One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.
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Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.
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Look at me. Look at me is one of the fundamental desires of human heart.
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If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
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But I simply can't stand a view limited to this earth, I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds...I like mathematics largely because it is not human.
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Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable.
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My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
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Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms no fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.
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For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy
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