b russell on humanity and love as the source of wisdom...

 "The East reveres Buddha, the West reveres Christ. Both taught love as the secret of wisdom. The earthly life of Christ was contemporary with that of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who spent his life in cruelty and disgusting debauchery and perversion. Tiberius had pomp and power; in his day millions trembled at his nod. But he is forgotten.

Those who live nobly, even if in their day they live obscurely, need not fear that they will have lived in vain. Something radiates from their lives, some light that shows the way to their friends, their neighbours perhaps to long future ages. I find many people nowadays oppressed with a sense of impotence, with the feeling that in the vastness of modern societies there is nothing of importance that the individual can do. This is a mistake.

The individual, if he is filled with love of mankind, with breadth of vision, with courage and with endurance, can do a great deal. Every one of us can enlarge our mind, release our imagination, and spread wide our affection and benevolence. And it is those who do this whom ultimately humankind reveres."

— Bertrand Russell, The New York Times Magazine (3 September 1950)

"Power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better."

— Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), Freedom and Society, p. 153Did Nietzsche believe in equality? Bertrand Russell's thoughts why he held Friedrich Nietzsche did not believe in egalitarianism.

"Nietzsche is not interested in the metaphysical truth of either Christianity or any other religion; being convinced that no religion is really true, he judges all religions entirely by their social effects. He agrees with the philosophers in objecting to submission to the supposed will of God, but he would substitute for it the will of earthly "artist-tyrants."

Submission is right, except for these supermen, but not submission to the Christian God. As for the Christian Churches' being allies of tyrants and enemies of democracy, that, he says, is the very reverse of the truth. Both the French and American Revolutions, and particularly Socialism are, according to him, essentially identical in spirit with Christianity; to all alike he is opposed, and for the same reason: that he will not treat all men as equal in any respect whatever."

— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part II, Ch: XXV, Nietzsche, p. 767

Image: Friedrich Nietzsche in Basel, Switzerland (circa 1875). Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, and poet. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. His ideas of individual overcoming and transcendence beyond structure and context have had a profound impact on late-twentieth and early-twenty first century thinkers, who have used these concepts as points of departure in the development of their philosophies.

Most recently, Nietzsche's reflections have been received in various philosophical approaches that move beyond humanism, e.g., transhumanism. Nietzsche's key ideas include perspectivism, the Will to Power the Death of God, the Übermensch and Eternal Recurrence. Nietzsche's attitude towards religion and morality was marked with a sharp atheism, psychologism and historism; he considered religion and morality to be human constructs loaded with the error of confusing cause and effect. His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary, and his influence remains substantial, especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism.

Nietzsche's ideas of individual overcoming and transcendence beyond structure and context have had a profound impact on late-twentieth and early-twenty first century thinkers, who have used these concepts as points of departure in the development of their philosophies. Nietzsche's name became associated with German militarism and Nazism, although many later 20th-century scholars have counteracted this conception of his ideas.

Six questions Bertrand Russell considers science (1946) cannot answer.

"Leaving aside, for the moment, all questions that have to do with ethics or with values, there are a number of purely theoretical questions, of perennial and passionate interest, which science is unable to answer, at any rate at present:

• Do we survive death in any sense, and if so, do we survive for a time or for ever?

• Can mind dominate matter, or does matter completely dominate mind, or has each, perhaps, a certain limited independence?

• Has the universe a purpose?

• Or is the universe driven by blind necessity?

• Or is the universe a mere chaos and jumble, in which the natural laws that we think we find are only a phantasy generated by our own love of order?

• If there is a cosmic scheme, has life more importance in it than astronomy would lead us to suppose, or is our emphasis upon life mere parochialism and self-importance?

I do not know the answer to these questions, and I do not believe that anybody else does, but I think human life would be impoverished if they were forgotten, or if definite answers were accepted without adequate evidence. To keep alive the interest in such questions, and to scrutinize suggested answers, is one of the functions of philosophy."

— Bertrand Russell, Philosophy for Laymen (1946), Universities Quarterly 1 (Nov 1946), pp. 38-49. Repr. Unpopular Essays (1950), Ch: II, p. 40

"Then there is the very common argument for God's existence, namely the Argument from natural law. People observed the planets going round the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation...

We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. Even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but we would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind.

The idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding us to behave a certain way, in which way we may choose to behave, or we may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that."

— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Natural-law argument for the existence of God was especially popular in the eighteenth century as a result of the influence of Sir Isaac Newton. As Bertrand Russell argued much later, many of the things we consider to be laws of nature, in fact, are human conventions. Indeed, Albert Einstein has shown that Newton's law of universal gravitation does not have universal application. The argument of natural laws as a basis for God was changed by Christian figures such as Thomas Aquinas, in order to fit biblical scripture and establish a Judeo-Christian teleological law.

Bertrand Russell concerning social justice:

“The only way in which a society can live for any length of time without violent strife is by establishing social justice, and social justice appears to each man to be injustice if he is persuaded that he is superior to his neighbors. Justice between classes is difficult where there is a class that believes itself to have a right to more than a proportionate share of power or wealth. Justice between nations is only possible through the power of neutrals, because each nation believes in its own superior excellence. Justice between creeds is even more difficult since each creed is convinced that it has a monopoly of the truth of the most important of all subjects. It would be increasingly easier than it is to arrange disputes amicably and justly if the philosophic outlook were more wide-spread.”

russell on religion

Among present-day religions Buddhism is best. The doctrines of Buddhism are profound, they are almost reasonable, and historically they have been the least harmful and the least cruel. But I cannot say that Buddhism is positively good, nor would I wish to have it spread all over the world and believed by everyone. This is because Buddhism only focuses on the question of what Man is, not on what the universe is like. Buddhism does not really pursue the truth; it appeals to sentiment and, ultimately, tries to persuade people to believe in doctrines which are based on subjective assumptions not objective evidence.

However, subjective opinions can produce false beliefs. I think that no matter what the religion, nor how ambiguously its faith is expressed, the same problem arises because of the substitution of subjective sentiment for objective evidence. Sentiment might be taken as the dominant force in our daily lives. But as for belief in facts, the farther we distance ourselves from sentiment the better. Never substitute sentiment for facts. It is absolutely harmful to do so."

— Bertrand Russell, Russell on Religion: Selections from the Writings of Bertrand Russell (1999), Part II, Religion and Philosophy, 6. The Essence and Effect of Religion(1921), p. 74

‘The Essence and Effect of Religion’ was originally a lecture given at the National University of Peking by Russell in 1921. In the lecture Russell addressed two questions: what is the essence of religions? and, is it necessary to preserve the essence of religions? Russell was impressed by the Chinese culture at the time, but more so by the Chinese people’s relaxed attitude towards religion. For example, the fact Confucianism was mostly concerned with ethics rather than dogma. This tolerant attitude Russell found quite different from the dominating and controlling one in the West, which by stressing dogma and demanding correct belief, he believed had caused much unnecessary suffering throughout European history.Bertrand Russell died on the 2nd of February 1970. He was 97 years old. Russell died of influenza, just after 8 pm on 2 February 1970 at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, United Kingdom. His body was cremated in Colwyn Bay on 5 February 1970 with five people present. In accordance with his will, there was no religious ceremony but one minute's silence; his ashes were scattered over the Welsh hills later that year.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell OM FRS, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970)

"When I was 4 years old I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven."

— Bertrand Russell, BBC Interview on Face to Face (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503

"I was told that the Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist."

— Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967–1969), Ch. 10: China, p. 365

"I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken."

— Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967–1969), Postscript, p. 789

A Sense of Humour (7 December 1932)

“You may question all sorts of things about a man without making him really angry. You may say that he is stupid, that he is ruthless, that he is not honest about money, that he allowed his aged mother to starve in a garret, and he will argue with you calmly and reasonably to prove that he is innocent of these various crimes. But if you say that he has no sense of humor you will invariably produce an explosion of fury. When people say to me things so simple as: ‘I always think the autumn is so much cooler than the summer. Ho! Ho! Ho!’ and expect me to behave as though I had heard an epigram worthy of Talleyrand, I find the appropriate behavior somewhat difficult.

If I had been adequately endowed with a sense of humour, I should not have minded this, but, alas, I am that extremely rare being, a man without a sense of humour. I had not suspected this painful fact until the middle of the War, when the British War Office sent for me and officially informed me of it. I gathered that if I had had my proper share of a sense of the ludicrous, I should have been highly diverted at the thought of several thousand men a day being blown to bits, which, I confess to my shame, never caused me even to smile. There was once a Chinese emperor who constructed a lake full of wine and drove peasants into it to amuse his wife with the struggles of their drunken drownings. Now he had a sense of humour."

— Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931–1935, Volumes I and II, A Sense of Humour (1932), p. 205

In the early 1930s, the New York American and other newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst published a literary page to which a large number of writers and artists contributed. Bertrand Russell was one of the regulars, contributing a total of 156 essays from 22 July 1931 to 2 May 1935. In one year alone (1933), he contributed fifty items, virtually one each week. A Sense of Humour (1932) was published on (7 December 1932).

"The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with the philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know and hate to be in error."

— Bertrand Russell, Philosophy for Laymen (1946), Universities Quarterly 1 (Nov 1946), 38-49 Repr. Unpopular Essays (1950), Ch: 2, p. 46

concerning Lenin and the brand of Marxism found in the early Soviet Union:

"When I visited Russia in 1920, I found there a philosophy very different from my own, a philosophy based upon hatred and force and despotic power. In the Marxist philosophy, as interpreted in Moscow, I found, as I believe, two enormous errors, one of theory and one of feeling. The error of theory consisted in believing that the only undesirable form of power over other human beings is economic power, and that economic power is co-extensive with ownership. In this theory other forms of power military, political and propagandist are ignored, and it is forgotten that the power of a large economic organization is concentrated in a small executive, and not diffused among all the nominal owners or shareholders.

It was therefore supposed that exploitation and oppression must disappear if the State became the sole capitalist, and it was not realized that this would confer upon State officials all, and more than all, the powers of oppression formerly possessed by individual capitalists. The other error, which was concerned with feeling consisted in supposing that a good state of affairs can be brought about by a movement of which the motive force is hate.

Those who had been inspired mainly by hatred of capitalists and landowners had acquired the habit of hating, and after achieving victory were impelled to look for new objects of detestation. Hence came, by a natural psychological mechanism, the purges, the massacre of Kulaks, and the forced labor camps. I am persuaded that

... Lenin and his early colleagues were actuated by a wish to benefit mankind, but from errors in psychology and political theory they created a hell instead of a heaven."

— Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory, Chapter I, An Autobiographical Epitome, p. 8

Background: In August 1920 Russell travelled to Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He met Vladimir Lenin and had a hour-long conversation with him. In his autobiography, he mentions that he found Lenin rather disappointing, sensing an "impish cruelty" in him and comparing him to "an opinionated professor". He cruised down the Volga on a steamship. His experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the revolution. He wrote a book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism about his experiences on this trip, taken with a group of 24 others from Britain, all of whom came home thinking well of the régime, despite Russell's attempts to change their minds. For example, he told them that he heard shots fired in the middle of the night and was sure these were clandestine executions, but the others maintained that it was only cars backfiring.

Image: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; alias Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924). Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and a political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1924. Under his administration, the Russian Empire was replaced by the Soviet Union; wealth including land, industry and business were nationalized. Based in Marxism, his political theories are known as Leninism. Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Admirers view him as a champion of working people's rights and welfare whilst critics seem him as brutal dictator who carried out mass human rights abuses.