Science & Tech Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell lands this like a clean scalpel cut: religion isn’t merely wrong, it’s outdated - a relic from a stage of mental development we’re supposed to outgrow. Calling it “left over from the infancy of our intelligence” does two things at once. It frames belief as an understandable early coping mechanism (infancy suggests vulnerability, need, dependence), while also quietly shaming adult attachment to it as a kind of arrested development. The line’s bite comes from that mix of apparent compassion and unmistakable condescension.

The subtext is progressive and Victorian in its confidence: history has a direction, and it points toward rationality. Russell is smuggling in a teleology of enlightenment where “reason and science” don’t just help adjudicate facts; they’re “guidelines,” a moral and civic operating system. That matters, because it turns epistemology into governance. He’s not only arguing about metaphysics, he’s arguing about what should rule public life: institutions built on evidence rather than revelation, authority earned through argument rather than tradition.

Context sharpens the edge. Russell wrote in a century bloodied by wars, propaganda, and authoritarian certainties - a period when “faith” could look less like solace and more like a technology of obedience. Yet the quote also exposes Russell’s most contestable assumption: that religion will “fade away” under modernity. The last hundred years have shown that belief adapts, mutates, and sometimes hardens in response to the very forces meant to replace it. The sentence works because it’s not a neutral forecast; it’s a provocation dressed as inevitability.