Famous Bertrand Russell Quotations

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"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."
by Bertrand Russell
"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
by Bertrand Russell
"Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
by Bertrand Russell
"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
by Bertrand Russell
"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."
by Bertrand Russell
"Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact."
by Bertrand Russell
"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."
by Bertrand Russell
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
by Bertrand Russell
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
by Bertrand Russell
"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf."
by Bertrand Russell
"The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation."
by Bertrand Russell
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
by Bertrand Russell
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
by Bertrand Russell
"Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."
by Bertrand Russell
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."
by Bertrand Russell
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
by Bertrand Russell
"The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."
by Bertrand Russell
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
by Bertrand Russell
"The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry."
by Bertrand Russell
"There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less."
by Bertrand Russell
"Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires."
by Bertrand Russell
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
by Bertrand Russell
"To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy."
by Bertrand Russell
"What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer."
by Bertrand Russell
"Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted."
by Bertrand Russell
"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."
by Bertrand Russell
"Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed."
by Bertrand Russell
"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."
by Bertrand Russell
"It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living."
by Bertrand Russell
"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."
by Bertrand Russell
"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."
by Bertrand Russell
"Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform."
by Bertrand Russell
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
by Bertrand Russell
"No one gossips about other people's secret virtues."
by Bertrand Russell
"Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic."
by Bertrand Russell
"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery."
by Bertrand Russell
"Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should."
by Bertrand Russell
"Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires."
by Bertrand Russell
"In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word."
by Bertrand Russell
"If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all."
by Bertrand Russell
"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years."
by Bertrand Russell
"Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery."
by Bertrand Russell
"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics."
by Bertrand Russell
"None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear."
by Bertrand Russell
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd."
by Bertrand Russell
"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."
by Bertrand Russell
"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."
by Bertrand Russell
"The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good."
by Bertrand Russell
"'Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
by Bertrand Russell
"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live."
by Bertrand Russell
"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it."
by Bertrand Russell
"A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short"
by Bertrand Russell
"A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short."
by Bertrand Russell
"A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known."
by Bertrand Russell
"A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress -- though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known."
by Bertrand Russell
"A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation."
by Bertrand Russell
"A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation."
by Bertrand Russell
"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand"
by Bertrand Russell
"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
by Bertrand Russell
"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the turtle standing on' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the little old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'"
by Stephen William Hawking
"A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is."
by Bertrand Russell
"Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age."
by Bertrand Russell
"Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me."
by Bertrand Russell
"All movements go too far."
by Bertrand Russell
"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."
by Bertrand Russell
"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths."
by Bertrand Russell
"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men although he was twice married, it never occured to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths."
by Bertrand Russell
"Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept."
by Bertrand Russell
"Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom."
by Bertrand Russell
"Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."
by Bertrand Russell
"Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."
by Bertrand Russell
"But all who are not lunitics are agreed about certain things: That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than to be a slave. Many people desire these things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy."
by Bertrand Russell
"Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy."
by Bertrand Russell
"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."
by Bertrand Russell
"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."
by Bertrand Russell
"Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race."
by Bertrand Russell
"Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame."
by Bertrand Russell
"Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance."
by Bertrand Russell
"Drunkenness is temporary suicide."
by Bertrand Russell
"Drunkenness is temporary suicide."
by Bertrand Russell
"Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm."
by Bertrand Russell
"Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instincts can be perceived."
by Bertrand Russell
"Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself."
by Bertrand Russell
"Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself."
by Bertrand Russell
"Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical."
by Bertrand Russell
"Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day."
by Bertrand Russell
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."
by Bertrand Russell
"Fear is, I believe, a most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual--and the soul of a people."
by Bertrand Russell
"Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires."
by Bertrand Russell
"Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government."
by Bertrand Russell
"I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex."
by Bertrand Russell
"I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along."
by Bertrand Russell
"I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race."
by Bertrand Russell
"I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return."
by Bertrand Russell
"I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy."
by Bertrand Russell
"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
by Bertrand Russell
"I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them though life against the shafts of impartial evidence."
by Bertrand Russell
"I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine."
by Bertrand Russell
"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."
by Bertrand Russell
"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."
by Bertrand Russell


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