Bertrand Russell — "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is…"
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Bertrand Russell
"It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."
"The more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs."
"We civilised men do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick .... Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. …"
"If a man is to be happy, he must not only be free from the fear of death, but from the fear of life."
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely t…"
About Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
British philosopher, logician, and Nobel literature laureate (1950) who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Whitehead and led 20th-century pacifist and nuclear-disarmament campaigns. Closely associated with Alfred North Whitehead (Principia Mathematica co-author) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (his student-then-rival). For an intellectual contrast, see F.H. Bradley, British Idealist philosopher — Russell's 1898 break with Bradley's neo-Hegelian Idealism — and his subsequent logical-atomism — is the founding moment of the Anglo-American analytic philosophy tradition that displaced Idealism for a century. Russell's entire early career is structured against Bradley's metaphysics of internal relations.
The standard scholarly entry points to Bertrand Russell's work: Ray Monk (Southampton, philosophy biographer) — Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 (1996); A.C. Grayling (New College of the Humanities) — Russell: A Very Short Introduction (1996). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Bertrand Russell.