E.S. Russell Quotes

Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.

When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

The purpose of education is to teach a defense against eloquence.

Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.

In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.

One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did

It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare.

Physics, owing to the simplicity of its subject matter, has reached a higher state of development than any other science.

To create a healthy philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician.

To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.

Emphatic and reiterated assertion, especially during childhood, produces in most people a belief so firm as to have a hold even over the unconscious.

For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.

The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security.

As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me.

Unfortunately, however, power is sweet, and the man who in the beginning seeks power merely in order to have scope for his benevolence is likely, before long, to love the power for its own sake.

Through the greatness of the universe, which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The reason is, and by rights ought to be, slave to the emotions.

A generation educated in fearless freedom will have wider and bolder hopes than are possible to us

It is not known why the Lord made the human body as he did, since one might suppose that omnipotence could have made it such as would not have shocked the nice people.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.

But I simply can't stand a view limited to this earth, I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds...I like mathematics largely because it is not human.

No other organization rouses anything like the loyalty aroused by the national State. And the chief activity of the State is preparation for large-scale homicide.

Teachers are more than any other group the guardians of civilization.

A million million years gives us some time to prepare for the end . . . let us make the best of it.

Americans need rest, but do not know it.

Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.

All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

Modern life cannot be constructed on . . . physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles.

Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instinct can be perceived.

The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

Do not feel certain of anything.

Literature is inexhaustible, with every book a homage to infinity

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.

Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It's out of your control and it's awesome — and it's not a career path.

I think if religion closes discussion or exchange of ideas or curiosity about other views, it's not true to its core.

I make every movie and every scene like it could be my last. That's the only way I know how to make cinema that stands on its feet. I have to treat it like that. It has to be life and death stakes.

I'm always looking for a way to surprise audiences. That's, I feel, my job as a director. I felt that Amy Adams playing a tough woman in 'The Fighter' was a surprise. People saw her as a princess.

Quite frankly, the bible is filled with advice that you'd never, want to follow. "Don't cut your hair on a rainy Thursday because locusts will eat your farm" kind of thing.

I think any spiritual experience that's worthwhile is not about ego and it will humble you in some way. And also, a Zen monk once said to me, 'If you're not laughing, then you're not getting it.'

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

When most people turn on their TVs, they don't expect a frank discussion of philosophical ideas in their practical context. Or any context.