Top 100 Quotes About Bertrand Russell
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The next time anyone asks you "What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?" the correct answer is "What year, please?"
Sidney Hook
#5. In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.
Paul Goodman
#6. Watch the thoughts, because in your watching them, they disappear. Then watch your emotions, sentimentalities; by your watching, they also disappear. Then your heart is as innocent as that of a child, and your head is as great a genius as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Aristotle. But
Osho
#7. My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.
Janet Fitch
#8. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection. - Bertrand Russell
Sandeep Jauhar
#9. Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Rollo May
#10. Well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy.
Stephen Hawking
#11. Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.
A.J. Ayer
#12. There can be no greater antithesis than between the Greeks' rational and objective truth and the "truth of unreason," as Bertrand Russell aptly termed faith in religions, fictions about supernatural beings that soothe and comfort weaklings who are afraid to contemplate the grim world of reality.
Revilo P. Oliver
#13. Bertrand Russell started off as a mathematician and then degenerated into a philosopher and finally into a humanist; he went downhill rapidly!
Gregory Chaitin
#14. Even Bertrand Russell, who fancied he saw flaws in Christ's character, confessed nonetheless that 'What the world needs is love, Christian love, or compassion.' But this belies a belief in what most others acknowledge, namely, that Christ was the perfect manifestation of the virtue of love.
Norman Geisler
#15. Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.
Marvin Minsky
#16. Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
Richard Dawkins
#17. The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.
Tom Hodgkinson
#18. To put it simply, we first explain what we are talking about, and then explain why what we are saying is true (pace Bertrand Russell).
Yuri Manin
#19. a statement by Bertrand Russell ... embodies the tone of heroic denunciation that you can muster only if you have drunk deeply from the cup of your own oracular majesty
David Brooks
#20. [I] browsed far outside science in my reading and attended public lectures - Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Huxley, and Shaw being my favorite speakers.
Raymond Cattell
#21. The ideological distance between Jim Webb and Bertrand Russell can be measured in light years. An author who reaches both of them exerts something like universal appeal.
Christopher Buckley
#22. because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes.
Jonathan Franzen
#23. In 1946, Bertrand Russell, a friend of Einstein, said it was necessary to use the fear of nuclear weapons to force all nations to give up their sovereignty and submit to the dictatorship of the United Nations.11
David Icke
#24. Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, "Sir, you did not give us enough information." I would add to that, "All the same, Sir, I'm not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.
Kurt Vonnegut
#25. A scientist can hardly meet with anything more undesirable than to have the foundations give way just as the work is finished. I was put in this position by a letter from Mr. Bertrand Russell when the work was nearly through the press.
Gottlob Frege
#26. Bertrand Russell claimed that "at least half the sins of mankind" were caused by the fear of boredom.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#27. I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
Carl Sandburg
#28. There are certain things that our age needs. It needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.
Bertrand Russell
#29. Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
Bertrand Russell
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell
#33. Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires
Bertrand Russell
#34. Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.
Bertrand Russell
#35. Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
Bertrand Russell
#36. This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.
Bertrand Russell
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
Bertrand Russell
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.
Bertrand Russell
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.
Bertrand Russell
#49. 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
#50. Televison allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone.
Bertrand Russell
#51. In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.
Bertrand Russell
#52. 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
#53. John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!
Bertrand Russell
#54. 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
#55. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.
Bertrand Russell
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#60. Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.
Bertrand Russell
#61. 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
#62. Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons
Bertrand Russell
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. If we compare Europe with other continents, it is marked out as [another] persecuting continent.
Bertrand Russell
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.
Bertrand Russell
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#83. I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.
Bertrand Russell
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. Escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.
Bertrand Russell
#90. In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are evidence of bias.
Bertrand Russell
#91. As for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them.
Bertrand Russell
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.
Bertrand Russell
#99. 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
#100. It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.
Bertrand Russell
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