After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
bertrand Russellquotes
1872 - 1970
Winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize in Literature, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), philosopher and mathematician, wrote, incredibly, a total of 70 books and over 2,000 articles in his 98-year lifespan. Gifted with the ability to write about difficult philosophical and mathematical topics in a language accessible to the layperson, Russell inspired readers with his passion and insight.
Orphaned at age 3, Russell was raised by his grandmother and schooled at home by governesses and tutors. He perfected French and German, and called Euclidean geometry his “first love.” At Trinity College, he earned degrees in both Mathematics and the Moral Sciences. He combined both passions in an attempt to discover a way to prove that truth was immutable and eternal. Initially, Russell argued for a metaphysical idealism in his works, but later on abandoned that theory for analytic philosophy.
After being fired from his position at Trinity College for campaigning against conscription during WWI, and jailed for six months by the British government, Russell found journalism and freelance writing more to his taste and carved a name for himself as an anti-war activist. Later, he campaigned against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, which led the British judiciary system to jail him again at the age of 89.
His extensive writing on social, political and moral issues granted him popularity in his day as a writer, but his contributions to logic and the philosophy of mathematics earned him the respect of generations to come as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century.
In labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.
It is here that Spinoza is in the right — a life dominated by a single passion is a narrow life, incompatible with every kind of wisdom.
In spite of the fundamental importance of economic facts in determining politics and beliefs of an age or nation, I do not think that non-economic factors can be neglected without risks of error which may be fatal in practice.
Following Locke’s doctrine that the mind is a tabula rasa, Helvetius considered the differences between individuals entirely due to differences of education: in every individual, his talents and his virtues are the effect of his instruction.
I have frequently experienced myself the mood in which I felt that all is vanity; I have emerged from it not by any philosophy, but owing to some imperative necessity of action.
Ibsen, Strindberg, and Nietzsche were angry men — not primarily angry about this or that, but just angry. And so they each found an outlook on life that justified anger. The young admired their passion, and found in it an outlet for their own feelings of revolt against parental authority. The assertion of freedom seemed sufficiently noble to justify violence; the violence duly ensued, but freedom was lost in the process.
I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters.
But in the ’nineties young men desired something more sweeping and passionate, more bold and less bland.
The discovery of geometry had intoxicated them, and its a priori deductive method appeared capable of universal application. They would prove, for instance, that all reality is one, that there is no such thing as change, that the world of sense is a world of mere illusion; and the strangeness of their results gave them no qualms because they believed in the correctness of their reasoning.
