Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. They say to themselves, for example, 'So this is what an earthquake is like,' and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.
Bertrand RussellThe most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next
Bertrand Russell[There are m]oral precepts that we consider really important, such as 'don't pick your nose' or 'don't eat peas with a knife'. There may, for ought I know, be admirable reasons for eating peas with a knife, but . . . early persuasion has made me completely incapable of appreciating them.
Bertrand RussellThe triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent.
Bertrand Russell