I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness… - Bertrand Russell

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

It is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens. Consider the long history of the activities inspired by moral fervour: human sacrifices, persecutions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms leading up to wholesale extermination by poison gases ... Are these abominations, and the ethical doctrines by which they are prompted, really evidence of an intelligent Creator? And can we really wish that the men who practised them should live for ever? The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.