Top 100 Quotes About Bertrand Russell
#1. There are certain things that our age needs. It needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.
Bertrand Russell
#2. Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
Bertrand Russell
#3. But how is this to be accomplished? "Cut away everything." The experience of "ecstasy" (standing outside one's own body) happened frequently to Plotinus: Many
Bertrand Russell
#4. Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
Bertrand Russell
#5. The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell
#6. Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires
Bertrand Russell
#7. Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.
Bertrand Russell
#8. Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
Bertrand Russell
#9. This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.
Bertrand Russell
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#12. Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored
Bertrand Russell
#13. Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers
and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt
of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of
sheep against the practice of eating mutton.
Bertrand Russell
#14. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Bertrand Russell
#15. Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man
Bertrand Russell
#16. Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal" which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.
Bertrand Russell
#17. Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.
Bertrand Russell
#19. I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability.
Bertrand Russell
#20. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.
Bertrand Russell
#21. There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.
Bertrand Russell
#22. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.
Bertrand Russell
#23. Televison allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone.
Bertrand Russell
#24. In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.
Bertrand Russell
#25. It is here that Spinoza is in the right - a life dominated by a single passion is a narrow life, incompatible with every kind of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
#26. John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!
Bertrand Russell
#27. Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice
Bertrand Russell
#28. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.
Bertrand Russell
#29. 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
#30. The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.
Bertrand Russell
#31. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#32. I still take great pleasure in playing around with philosophical questions, the ones that [Bertrand] Russell is the first to admit have no unequivocal answers. . . . I guess this quality makes me a Cerebral Hedonist, although some would say it makes me a mental masochist.
Daniel Klein
#34. Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.
Bertrand Russell
#35. Emphatic and reiterated assertion, especially during childhood, produces in most people a belief so firm as to have a hold even over the unconscious.
Bertrand Russell
#36. Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons
Bertrand Russell
#37. Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
Bertrand Russell
#38. It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.
Bertrand Russell
#39. If we compare Europe with other continents, it is marked out as [another] persecuting continent.
Bertrand Russell
#40. Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.
Bertrand Russell
#41. The teacher, like the artist and the philosopher, can perform his work adequately only if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.
Bertrand Russell
#42. Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell
#44. A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.
Bertrand Russell
#45. I FIND IT SO DIFFICULT NOT TO HATE, WHEN I DO NOT HATE I FEEL WE FEW ARE SO LONELY IN THE WORLD
Bertrand Russell
#46. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life - in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God.
Frank Sinatra
#47. When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder.
Bertrand Russell
#48. I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.
Bertrand Russell
#49. Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.
Bertrand Russell
#50. If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians.
Bertrand Russell
#51. No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value.
Bertrand Russell
#52. You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.
Bertrand Russell
#53. Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.
Bertrand Russell
#54. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#55. 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
#56. There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.
Bertrand Russell
#57. The Pleroma is the totality. The superset. Magisteria are the subsets." Eat your heart out, Bertrand Russell. "We all have one. Even you. Your own little slice of the divine.
Ian Tregillis
#59. I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.
Bertrand Russell
#60. Since this craving (for material possessions) is in the nature of competition, it only brings happiness when we outdistance a rival, to whom it brings correlative pain.
Bertrand Russell
#61. If we spent half an hour every day in silent immobility, I am convinced that we should conduct all our affairs, personal, national, and international, far more sanely than we do at present.
Bertrand Russell
#62. All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?
Bertrand Russell
#63. 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
#65. Escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.
Bertrand Russell
#66. In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are evidence of bias.
Bertrand Russell
#67. As for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them.
Bertrand Russell
#68. All the labours of ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinciton in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.
Bertrand Russell
#69. If you question any candid person who is no longer young, he is very likely to tell you that, having tasted life in this world, he has no wish to begin again as a "new boy" in another.
Bertrand Russell
#70. A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance?
Bertrand Russell
#71. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Bertrand Russell
#72. At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Bertrand Russell
#73. The need of politeness is at its maximum in speaking with foreigners, and is so irksome as to be paralysing to those who are only accustomed to compatriots.
Bertrand Russell
#74. Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.
Bertrand Russell
#75. The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence
Bertrand Russell
#76. The next time anyone asks you "What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?" the correct answer is "What year, please?"
Sidney Hook
#77. It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.
Bertrand Russell
#78. It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts,
that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.
Bertrand Russell
#79. None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.
Bertrand Russell
#80. Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
#81. Will machines destroy emotions or will emotions destroy machines?
Bertrand Russell
#82. Any philosophy worth taking seriously would have to be built upon a firm foundation of unyielding despair.
Bertrand Russell
#83. What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.
Bertrand Russell
#84. No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.
Bertrand Russell
#85. The problem of political theory is how to combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress, with the degree of social cohesion which is necessary for survival.
Bertrand Russell
#86. It is interesting to observe what the Cynic teaching became when it was popularized. In the early part of the third century B.C., the cynics were the fashion, especially in Alexandria. They published little sermons pointing out how easy it is to do without material possessions,
Bertrand Russell
#87. Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Bertrand Russell
#88. Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.
Bertrand Russell
#90. Who ever heard a theologian preface his creed, or a politician conclude his speech with an estimate of the probable error of his opinion?
Bertrand Russell
#91. The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
Bertrand Russell
#92. Science seems to be at war with itself ... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
Bertrand Russell
#93. 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
#94. It may be laid down broadly that irrationalism, i.e., disbelief in objective fact, arises almost always from the desire to assert something for which there is no evidence, or to deny something for which there is very good evidence.
Bertrand Russell
#95. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#96. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#97. 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.
Bertrand Russell
#98. Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.
Bertrand Russell
#99. One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.
Bertrand Russell
#100. 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
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