Bertrand Russell
Rebecca Goldstein
I didn’t like the school I went to. I found it very oh, I don’t know, I think I sort of found it foolish. ((Cosmology)) I resented all of the restrictions. I resented the restrictions that were specifically designed for girls, that the boys I knew were studying intellectually more challenging things than the girls, and I just felt very outraged with that. ((Salary Of Both, The Virgin Birth)) And I had already become very interested in science and particularly physics, and that was not because I was taught in a school, I was taught very little in school, but from the library, and I also had read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, which went through arguments for the existence of God and refuted them. And he was so good at — to me it was so conclusive that — even though I had never been a Christian, it worked on me too, it worked on a little Jewish girl. ((Anthropologically Correct, Want To Be Individual)) So, I was — and I just was kind of already hooked on, to me, what seemed like the most adventurous thing that I could possibly do, which would be to try to learn as much as I could, that just seemed to me like an adventure. And it was exciting and risk taking and defiant and all those things you want to be when you’re an adolescent.