Education Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell is needling the human appetite for certainty: the hotter the feeling, the thinner the file. The line works because it sounds like a cool scientific law (an inverse relationship, neat and measurable) while quietly mocking how unscientific we behave in public. He isn’t praising bloodless rationality so much as exposing a recurring pattern: outrage, zeal, and moral panic often bloom where information is scarce, because ignorance leaves room for narrative to rush in and do the heavy lifting.

The subtext is doubly pointed. First, it’s a jab at the crowd and the demagogue: if you can keep people from facts, you can keep them in a constant emotional pitch, easily mobilized and hard to persuade. Second, it’s a jab at the self: the emotion isn’t merely a reaction to events; it’s a substitute for the work of understanding. Knowledge complicates. Facts introduce trade-offs, timelines, probabilities, and the maddening possibility that your side is partly wrong. Emotions prefer clean villains and simple arcs.

Context matters. Russell wrote and spoke through an era of world wars, propaganda, ideological mass movements, and the rise of mass media - a period that taught intellectuals how efficiently publics can be steered by fear and pride. But he’s also making an epistemic claim about everyday thinking: the more you actually know, the more you’re forced into nuance, which cools the temperature. The sting is that “nuance” here isn’t a virtue signal; it’s what reality costs.