A sampling of Bertrand Russell quotes

Yesterday I wrote a post describing how I discovered Bertrand Russell while I was an intellectually frustrated and isolated teen-aged boy.  Back then, I was startled to see someone else who was publicly critical of religious institutions.  Thinking about those days yesterday provoked me to scour the Internet today for some of Russell’s well-known quotes.  There are many more Russell quotes out there than these; he was a prolific writer.

Russell, best known for being a mathematician and logician, dismayed many people while he was alive. After all, he didn’t believe in God. He spoke openly of sexual pleasure being a good thing; he protested against the Vietnam war.  Now, however, many of his writings seem only like common sense.

I admired Russell’s clean writing style, his sense of wit, his astute observations and his good heart. 

  • It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
  • “The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
  • The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
  • One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
  • The most
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Why I blog

Pouring time into this blog has been deeply satisfying to me.  But what is this accomplishing, I sometimes wonder? 

After all, there are already numerous writers out there.  Technorati.com indicates that it is now tracking 48.5 million sites and 2.7 billion links.  Plus, there are numerous traditional sources of information (books, magazines, movies, television) available to anyone who is interested.

I don’t have any illusions about my alleged importance.  As Charles De Gaulle famously said, “The cemetery is full of indispensable people.”  Nonetheless, I joined the Blogosphere to have a voice and to hopefully present a meaningfully unique voice.  This blog is an experiment that will always be provisional and evolving.

This blog grew out of an email relationship between a fellow who lives in Madison (he goes by the name of Grumpypilgrim on this blog) and me.  I met “Grumpy” when I provided legal services for a company for whom Grumpy worked.  We had emailed our rants and observations back and forth for more than a year.  Eventually, I suggested that we exchange our ideas in a public way, in case anyone else might be interested. 

Two months later, dangerousintersection.org was designed by Nick Smith of nicksmithdesign.com.  I chose the name after looking at a big yellow “Dangerous Intersection” sign I had in my office (I had it around as a novelty) and after considering how that name might generally fit an iconoclastic blog.  I took the photo of the intersection used in the site’s logo. Nick made it …

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Playing to the terrorists’ strength

Condi Rice was on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopolis" talking about how Isreal should "consider the broader consequences" of its current bombing activities in Lebanon, and she specifically urged Isreal to try harder to avoid civilian casualties. Huh?  As much as I deplore Israel's bombings, does anyone in the…

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What is Critical Thinking?

The term “critical thinking” is in danger of becoming a cliche.   In the March 2006 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, Howard Gabennesch worked to put some edges on what type of thinking actually qualifies as “critical thinking.”  I will cite extensively from this article.

For starters, “a critical thinker is disinclined to take things at face value, suspicious of certainties, not easily swayed by conventional (or unconventional) wisdom, and distrustful of the facades and ideologies that serve as the ubiquitous cosmetics of social life. In other words, critical thinkers are necessarily skeptics.”  Referring to Skeptic Magazine, Gabennesch described skeptics as follows:

  1. Skeptics do not believe easily. They have outgrown childlike credulity to a greater extent than most adults ever do.
  2. When skeptics take a position, they do so provisionally. They understand that their knowledge on any subject is fallible, incomplete, and subject to change.
  3. Skeptics defer to no sacred cows. They regard orthodoxies as the mortal enemy of critical thought-all orthodoxies, including those that lie close to home.

True skeptics leave open the possibility that their foundational assumptions will be disturbed.  “Toes will be stepped on, tempers could flare, mortified members of the audience may stagger from the room.”  Gabennesch cites the following examples of the sorts of claims about which true skeptics consciously work to keep an open mind, despite heavy social pressure to do otherwise:

  • From the beginning, AIDS has been exaggerated as a significant threat to heterosexuals in the U.S.
  • It is far from clear
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The magnitude and the music make war AOK

My government’s violent occupation of Iraq has not flustered me nearly as much as the nonchalance of half of America.  Why are so many Americans utterly complacent about the wretched and rampant killing going on in our names?  Is it possible that we have become confused and seduced by the magnitude of the killings and by the music?  Allow me to explain.

First, the magnitude.  Stalin’s well-cited quote comes to mind: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”  Perhaps the immoral nature of Bush’s aggression would be clearer had Bush caused the death of only one man.  Imagine this hypothetical: 

President Bush looks out the window of the oval office and sees a man wearing a backpack walking down the sidewalk.  In a dry-drunkish paranoid moment, Bush tells his security officers that the man walking down the sidewalk has nuclear weapons grade aluminum tubes in his backpack and orders his guards to capture “that terrorist.”  While capturing the man with the backpack (it turns out to be empty), a U.S soldier is accidentally shot by friendly fire of a fellow soldier.

It is later disclosed that, one minute before giving his order to capture the man, a former ambassador had advised Bush the man wearing the backpack had just been searched and that he was not carrying anything dangerous.  Then it came out that Bush and his highest advisers had intentionally blown the cover of a CIA agent to discredit the former

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