“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”

— Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight, 1917

About Bertrand Russell

1872 – 1970

British philosopher and logician, Nobel laureate in Literature (1950).

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”

“The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.”

“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

“Worrying and anxiety go together, but worry is not an emotion; it's the thinking part of anxiety.”

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

“Love can defeat that nameless terror. Loving one another, we take the sting from death.”

“Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.”

“A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.”

“Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind.”