Bertrand Russell Quotes

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.

The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security.

As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me.

Unfortunately, however, power is sweet, and the man who in the beginning seeks power merely in order to have scope for his benevolence is likely, before long, to love the power for its own sake.

Through the greatness of the universe, which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The reason is, and by rights ought to be, slave to the emotions.

A generation educated in fearless freedom will have wider and bolder hopes than are possible to us

It is not known why the Lord made the human body as he did, since one might suppose that omnipotence could have made it such as would not have shocked the nice people.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.

But I simply can't stand a view limited to this earth, I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds...I like mathematics largely because it is not human.

No other organization rouses anything like the loyalty aroused by the national State. And the chief activity of the State is preparation for large-scale homicide.

Teachers are more than any other group the guardians of civilization.

A million million years gives us some time to prepare for the end . . . let us make the best of it.

Americans need rest, but do not know it.

Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.

All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

Modern life cannot be constructed on . . . physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles.

Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instinct can be perceived.

The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

Do not feel certain of anything.

Literature is inexhaustible, with every book a homage to infinity

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.

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.

Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.

The whole conception of 'sin' is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of them can be true.

In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.

I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and now.

When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope.

Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.

Change is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical. Change is indubitable whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

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

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

When the qualities that now confer leadership have become universal, there will no longer be leaders and followers, and democracy will have been realized at last.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children.

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