Quotes by
Bertrand Russell |
1872-1970 , British philosopher
British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. In 1950, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. | 77 quotes | 5,249 visits |
Quotations
| • | The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. 26 |
| • | Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. 18 |
| • | Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. 4 |
| • | Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate. 2 |
| • | Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. |
| • | The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. |
| • | The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. |
| • | Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. |
| • | Faith: a firm belief for which there is no evidence. |
| • | The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible. |
| • | I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. |
| • | Next to worry probably one of the most potent causes of unhappiness is envy. |
| • | War doesn't determine who's right, it determines who's left. |
| • | Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? |
| • | Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that is happiness. |
| • | Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. |
| • | One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. |
| • | Most human beings, though in varying degrees, desire to control, not only their own lives but also the lives of others. |
| • | No great achievement is possible without persistent work. |
| • | The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation. |
| • | Beware the man of the single book. (the Bible) |
| • | A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand. |
| • | Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. |
| • | And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence. |
| • | I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work. |
| • | We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach. |
| • | One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny. |
| • | Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know. |
| • | My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter. |
| • | One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected. |
| • | If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote? |
| • | Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. |
| • | Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim. |
| • | Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. |
| • | Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven. |
| • | A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime. |
| • | I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: “The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.” In these words he epitomized the history of the human race. |
| • | Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy. |
| • | So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. |
| • | Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. |
| • | We must be skeptical even of our skepticism. |
| • | Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government. |
| • | Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution. |
| • | Television allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone. |
| • | Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame. |
| • | When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; “will I be able to talk with this person into old age?” Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation. |
| • | Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. |
| • | Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give. |
| • | To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom. |
| • | There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. |
| • | The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn. |
| • | Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. |
| • | No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues. |
| • | It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. |
| • | There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts. |
| • | 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 the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards. |
| • | Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it. |
| • | Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty –a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. |
| • | Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. |
| • | The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm. |
| • | There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. |
| • | Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. |
| • | A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past. |
| • | Drunkenness is temporary suicide. |
| • | It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion. |
| • | Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. |
| • | The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. |
| • | The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. |
| • | Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos. |
| • | Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination. |
| • | Plotinus is both an end and a beginning: an end as regards the Greeks, a beginning as regards Christendom. |
| • | The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. |
| • | If you're certain, you're certainly wrong, because nothing deserves certainty. |
| • | Either Man will abolish war, or war will abolish Man. |
| • | There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire –poison and antidote. |
| • | The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. |
| • | In all affairs –love, religion, politics, or business– it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. |
