Top 100 Bertrand Russell Quotes
#1. Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way
Bertrand Russell
#2. Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.
Bertrand Russell
#3. One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his or her work important.
Bertrand Russell
#4. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world.
Bertrand Russell
#5. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#6. Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
Bertrand Russell
#7. Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.
Bertrand Russell
#8. Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.
Bertrand Russell
#9. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?
Bertrand Russell
#10. I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in.
Bertrand Russell
#11. Men have physical needs, and they have emotions. While physical needs are unsatisfied, they take first place; but when they are satisfied, emotions unconnected with them become important in deciding whether a man is to be happy or unhappy.
Bertrand Russell
#12. To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.
Bertrand Russell
#13. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Bertrand Russell
#14. The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.
Bertrand Russell
#15. I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.
Bertrand Russell
#16. A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal ...
Bertrand Russell
#17. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#18. Calculating machines do sums better than even the cleverest people ... As arithmetic has grown easier, it has come to be less respected.
Bertrand Russell
#19. The Ten Commandments should be headed like an examination paper: No more than six to be attempted.
Bertrand Russell
#20. In detective stories ... I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but ... there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild.
Bertrand Russell
#22. Those who defend traditional morality will sometimes admit that it is not perfect, but contend that any criticism will make all morality crumble.
Bertrand Russell
#23. Morally, a philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.
Bertrand Russell
#24. I often long to ... give up my life to love of my neighbour. This is really a temptation.
Bertrand Russell
#26. One's work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days.
Bertrand Russell
#27. The Mormons had a divine revelation in favour of polygamy, but under pressure from the United States Government they discovered that the revelation was not binding.
Bertrand Russell
#28. Artists are on the average less happy than men of science.
Bertrand Russell
#29. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
Bertrand Russell
#30. Only those who slavishly worship success can think that effectiveness is admirable without regard to what is effected.
Bertrand Russell
#31. It is we who create value and our desires which confer value. In this realm we are kings, and we debase our kingship if we bow down to Nature. It is for us to determine the good life, not for Nature - not even for Nature personified as God.
Bertrand Russell
#32. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
Bertrand Russell
#33. Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.
Bertrand Russell
#34. The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environments.
Bertrand Russell
#35. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#36. Two people between whom there is love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the success of either is the failure of the other. If
Bertrand Russell
#37. Some of the deepest truths are simple, when seen in the clearest light, and it takes a lucid intellect to grasp them so thoroughly that their simplicity can be brought into that light and offered to all, not just the privileged few.
Bertrand Russell
#38. Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence.
Bertrand Russell
#39. The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
Bertrand Russell
#40. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#42. Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.
Bertrand Russell
#43. It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise.
Bertrand Russell
#44. And if happiness were common, it would preserve itself, because appeals to hatred and fear, which now constitute almost the whole of politics would fall flat.
Bertrand Russell
#45. Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.
Bertrand Russell
#46. By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.
Bertrand Russell
#47. The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernal of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.
Bertrand Russell
#48. All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.
Bertrand Russell
#49. To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal.
Bertrand Russell
#50. There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
Bertrand Russell
#51. Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
Bertrand Russell
#52. You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.
Bertrand Russell
#53. The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
Bertrand Russell
#54. A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.
Bertrand Russell
#55. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
Bertrand Russell
#56. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
#57. The teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians.
Bertrand Russell
#58. Upon hearing via Littlewood an exposition on the theory of relativity: To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.
Bertrand Russell
#59. Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.
Bertrand Russell
#60. Shakespeare ... If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him [if you can].
Bertrand Russell
#61. Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform.
Bertrand Russell
#62. In general, I find that things that have happened to me out of doors have made a deeper impression than things that have happened indoors.
Bertrand Russell
#63. It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.
Bertrand Russell
#64. Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.
Bertrand Russell
#65. Uncomplicated joy and sorrow is not matter for philosophy, but rather for the simpler kinds of poetry and music.
Bertrand Russell
#66. Santayana ... reasoned that the young men who were being killed in the war would die anyhow sooner or later, and would be good for nothing while they lived.
Bertrand Russell
#67. As soon as it is held that any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up.
Bertrand Russell
#68. One of the troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds on. The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about.
Bertrand Russell
#70. A man cannot possibly be at peace with others until he has learned to be at peace with himself.
Bertrand Russell
#71. The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of which our age has to boast.
Bertrand Russell
#72. Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell
#73. Very few people are able to discount the effect of circumstances upon their own characters.
Bertrand Russell
#74. Galileo and Kepler had "dangerous thoughts" (as they are called in Japan), and so have the most intelligent men of our own day.
Bertrand Russell
#75. To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.
Bertrand Russell
#76. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#77. Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Bertrand Russell
#78. It seems that sin is geographical. From this conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of 'sin' is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practised in punishing it is unnecessary.
Bertrand Russell
#79. What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Bertrand Russell
#80. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#81. Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Bertrand Russell
#82. Intelligence, it might be said, has caused our troubles; but it is not unintelligence that will cure them. Only more and wiser intelligence can make a happier world
Bertrand Russell
#84. Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty ... and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love.
Bertrand Russell
#85. The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.
Bertrand Russell
#86. I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
Bertrand Russell
#87. It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.
Bertrand Russell
#88. Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.
Bertrand Russell
#89. Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one's own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.
Bertrand Russell
#90. The belief that personality is mysterious and irreducible has no scientific warrant, and is accepted chiefly because it is flattering to our human self esteem.
Bertrand Russell
#91. Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven.
Bertrand Russell
#92. All the important human advances that we know of since historical times began have been due to individuals of whom the majority faced virulent public opposition.
Bertrand Russell
#93. It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.
Bertrand Russell
#94. It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world.
Bertrand Russell
#95. One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
Bertrand Russell
#96. Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.
Bertrand Russell
#97. Ideas and principles that do harm are as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions.
Bertrand Russell
#99. The whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
Bertrand Russell
#100. While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make.
Bertrand Russell
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