Bertrand Russell quotes:

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  • Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

  • The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

  • 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.

  • No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

  • Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

  • Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

  • Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

  • The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

  • We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

  • 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.

  • I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

  • Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

  • The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

  • 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.

  • Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.

  • To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

  • 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.

  • To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

  • Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

  • To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

  • Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

  • Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

  • The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

  • 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.

  • Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

  • There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

  • The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

  • Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.

  • The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.

  • Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

  • Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

  • Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

  • Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

  • The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

  • Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

  • Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

  • Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

  • Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.

  • If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

  • The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

  • The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

  • Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

  • To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

  • The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

  • Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

  • Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

  • 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.

  • No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

  • War grows out of ordinary human nature.

  • The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.

  • 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."

  • If wars are eliminated and production is organized scientifically, it is probable that four hours' work a day will suffice to keep everybody in comfort"

  • Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?"

  • The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held; instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

  • The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

  • Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

  • The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life [and] the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness. [. . .] He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

  • There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

  • One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.

  • And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

  • The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

  • 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.

  • Analytic It is clear that the definition of "logic" or "mathematics" must be sought by trying to give a new definition of the old notion of "analytic" propositions.

  • There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.

  • Answering questions is a major part of sex education. Two rules cover the ground. First, always give a truthful answer to a question; secondly, regard sex knowledge as exactly like any other knowledge.

  • War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

  • 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.

  • When two great powers disagree about anything - it doesn't matter what - they must find a way to settle it somehow by arbitration or by negotiation, not by war or threat of war.

  • I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

  • Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

  • The atomic bomb embodies the results of a combination genius and patience as remarkable as any in the history of mankind.

  • Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.

  • 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.

  • In a Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved its fortunes by shooting a sufficient number of the representatives of the other side to give it a majority. . . . Cromwell and Robespierre . . . acted likewise..

  • Mankind is divided into two classes: those who, being artificial, praise nature, and those who, being natural, praise art.

  • Belief systems provide a programme which relieves the necessity of thought.

  • Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity.

  • Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.

  • I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer.

  • If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.

  • Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.

  • None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

  • It is impossible to read in America, except on a train, because of the telephone. Everyone has a telephone, and it rings all day and most of the night.

  • One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

  • If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one's happiness would be increased

  • I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.

  • Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

  • It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

  • The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

  • The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

  • Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

  • The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. So long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.

  • I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.

  • It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.

  • I do not think any reasonable person can doubt that in India, China and Japan, if the knowledge of birth control existed, the birthrate would fall very rapidly

  • Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

  • A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

  • Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

  • Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.

  • It's coexistence or no existence.

  • Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.

  • America remained a land of promise for lovers of freedom. Even Byron, at a moment when he was disgusted with Napoleon for not committing suicide, wrote an eloquent stanza in praise of Washington.

  • Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.

  • A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.

  • To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century.

  • Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

  • The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

  • Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

  • The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

  • Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

  • When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.

  • Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.

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