Bertrand Russell Quotes (333 Quotes)


    It is only the intellect that keeps me sane perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling

    To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.


    There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.



    It is illegal in England to state in print that a wife can and should derive sexual pleasure from intercourse

    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.

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

    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.

    I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers expected me to accept,

    Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

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

    Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

    By religion I mean a set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual

    Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes

    It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

    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.

    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.

    It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.


    Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum one man will think that he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God.

    One occasion for theological intervention to prevent the mitigation of human suffering was the discovery of anesthetics

    Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

    This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind.

    If we were all given by magic power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships

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

    Upon hearing via Littlewood an exposition on the theory of relativity To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.

    At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

    2. 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.

    Mankind . . . are a mistake. The universe would be sweeter and fresher without them

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

    The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

    What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.

    Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true.

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

    The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress.

    In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

    The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against nature.

    Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.


    The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

    Before World War I one of the objections commonly urged against votes for women was that women would tend to be pacifists. During the war they gave a large-scale refutation of this charge, and the vote was given to them for their share in the bloody

    I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.

    Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.

    In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

    Most people would rather die than think in fact, they do so.

    If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would do it.

    Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.

    It seems clear that there must be some way of defining logic otherwise than in relation to a particular logical language. The fundamental characteristic of logic, obviously, is that which is indicated when we say that logical propositions are true in virt.

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


    Related Authors


    Heraclitus - Deepak Chopra - Aristotle - Albert Camus - Theodor Adorno - Swami Sivananda - Marquis de Condorcet - Leo Strauss - Baruch Spinoza - Anaxagoras


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