Bertrand Russell — "What men want is not knowledge but certainty."
What men want is not knowledge but certainty.
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More from Bertrand Russell
"It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion."
"Orthodoxy is the graveyard of intelligence."
"The universe may have a purpose, but no detectable purpose."
"Conscientious objection is a right that the state should respect, but which it has hardly ever respected."
"The problem with men is that they are too reasonable."
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.