Bertrand Russell Quotes (333 Quotes)

In a society safe and worthy to be free, teaching which produces a willingness to lead, as well as a willingness to follow, must be given to all.

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 fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

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

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

The conception of purpose is a natural one to apply to a human artificer. A man who desires a house cannot, except in the Arabian Nights, have it rise before him as a result of his mere wish time and labor must be expended before his wish can be gra

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by sceptics.

Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, A larger portion of fear than they should.

Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth

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

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.

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

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

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

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

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.

The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings, eI was a solitary, shy, priggish youth. I had no experience of the social pleasures of boyhood and did not miss them. But I liked mathematics, and mathematics was suspect because it has n

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Men, quite ordinary men, will compel children to look on while their mothers are raped. In pursuit of political aims men will submit their opponents to long years of unspeakable anguish

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

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

Sin is geographical.

Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.

Some advanced thinkers' are of the opinion that anyone who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion if it were not, truth would be easier to come by than it is

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

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.

Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself ... When we compare the (present) human population of the globe with ... that of former times, we see that 'chemical imperialism' has been ... the main end to which human intelligence has been devoted.

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

Psychology often becomes the disease of which it should be the cure

Its not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.

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

To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Francis Bacon, a man who rose to eminence by betraying his friends, asserted, no doubt as one of the ripe lessons of experience, that knowledge is power

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.

Sex outside marriage is sin sex within marriage is not sin.

4. Form The 'form' of a proposition is that, in it, which remains unchanged when every constituent of the proposition is replaced by another.

The conscientious Radical is faced with great difficulties. He knows that he can increase his popularity by being false to his creed, and appealing to hatreds that have nothing to do with the reforms in which he believes

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.

Those who first advocated religious toleration were thought wicked, and so were the early opponents of slavery.