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Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35

Book by Bertrand Russell · 4 quotes · Adults, Dogma, Generation Gap

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Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35 Quotes

“The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it.”

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Book:Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35
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“The man who is respected merely for being the son of his father loses one of the normal incentives to useful effort. He is likely to develop views of life which attach undue importance to the accident of birth and to think that by merely existing he does enough to command respect. He believes himself rather better than other men and therefore becomes rather worse. All distinctions not based upon intrinsic merit have this bad effect upon character and on this ground, if on no other, deserve to be abolished,”

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Book:Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-35
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