The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.
Interpretation
Russell suggests that if the world is created with purpose, it implies a malicious intent, making randomness a more acceptable explanation.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell reflects on the nature of existence and the world we inhabit. He posits that if the world's complexity and difficulty stem from a deliberate design, it would imply a malevolent creator—an idea he finds troubling. Instead, he suggests that random chance and accident provide a more palatable and plausible explanation for life's intricacies, allowing for the acknowledgment of chaos rather than the burden of a sinister purpose behind our reality.
In practice
In a philosophy class when discussing the nature of existence.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.
An age that melts in unperceiv'd decay, And glides in modest innocence away.
The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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