Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing “about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. — BERTRAND RUSSELL

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

It’s sad when people are stupid.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.
Around us all-now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog-there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottoms of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt-doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging.
It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he no real idea how long a lease he has on his future. It is to try to meet the challenge of such questions that we have prepared these broadcasts. It has been a difficult task and a delicate one. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice-and those thoughts we aren’t interested in-people don’t speak their beliefs easily or publicly

There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.

When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time you're rather unhappy, actually, with this confusion. You can't penetrate this thing. Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it, the idea? And I get this feeling all the time that I'm an ape trying to put two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.

The stupid believe because they are credulous. The intelligent do not blindly accept but, when aware of their own ignorance, neither do they reject.

Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.