Bertrand Russell “There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

 “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.”
― Bertrand Russell

“War does not determine who is right - only who is left.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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”
― Bertrand Russell

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “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.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. ”
― Bertrand Russell

“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”
― Bertrand Russell

“It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.”
― Bertrand Russell

“There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society

“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, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.”
― Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

 “So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

 “Beware the man of a single book.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.”
― Bertrand Russell

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

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

 “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.”
― Bertrand Russell, On Education

 “I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. ”
― Bertrand Russell

 “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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 paradise in a few years.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”
― Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics

 “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

 “Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

 “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “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.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

 “Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know”
― Bertrand Russell

 “The secret of happiness is this: let your interest be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons who interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. ”
― Bertrand Russell

 “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

 “Sin is geographical.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “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.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge”
― Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Value

 “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. ”
― Bertrand Russell

 “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.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in.”
― Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind

 “I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.”
― Bertrand Russell, Dear Bertrand Russell... A Selection Of His Correspondence With The General Public 1950 1968

 “Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

 “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “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. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world - its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and not be afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

 “The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems Of Philosophy

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.”
― Bertrand Russell

“the world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to get sharper”
― Bertrand Russell

 “The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Every isolated passion, is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fulfillment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in form of explicit and conscious fanaticism, sometimes in paralyzing timidity, sometimes in an unconscious or subconscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. The man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell

“It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell

“No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, 'You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.' He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right.”
― Bertrand Russell

“No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Morality in sexual relations, when it is free from superstition, consists essentially in respect for the other person, and unwillingness to use that person solely as a means of personal gratification, without regard to his or her desires.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.”
― Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”
― Bertrand Russell

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“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. ”
― Bertrand Russell

“The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.”
― Bertrand Russell

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.”
― Bertrand Russell

tags: argument-from-design, bertrand-russell, god , moon , philosophy, religion, russell , why-i-am-not-a-christian

“One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “The use of self control is like the use of brakes on train. It is useful when you find yourself in wrong direction but merely harmful when the direction is right”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

 “The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

“Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.”
― Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World

“The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others 1: American Essays 1931-35

“Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.”
― Bertrand Russell

“a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divoriced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.”
― Bertrand Russell

“(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

 “Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...”
― Bertrand Russell

“It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Here there comes a practical question which has often troubled me. Whenever I go into a foreign country or a prison or any similar place they always ask me what is my religion.

I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist". It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.

Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line. ”
― Bertrand Russell

“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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, The Impact of Science on Society

“The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I feel as if one would only discover on one's death-bed what one ought to have lived for, and realise too late that one's life has been wasted. Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons”
― Bertrand Russell

“The ancient world found an end to anarchy in the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire was a brute fact, not an idea. The Catholic world sought an end to anarchy in the church, which was an idea, but was never adequately embodied in fact. Neither the ancient nor the medieval solution was satisfactory – the one because it could not be idealized, the other because it could not be actualized. The modern world, at present, seems to be moving towards a solution like that of antiquity: a social order imposed by force, representing the will of the powerful rather than the hopes of the common men. The problem of a durable and satisfactory social order can only be solved by combining the solidarity of the Roman Empire with the idealism of St. Augustine’s City of God. To achieve this a new philosophy will be needed”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

 “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. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. 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, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “One must care about a world one will not see.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“La Ciencia en ningún momento está totalmente en lo cierto, pero rara vez está completamente equivocada y tiene en general mayores posibilidades de estar en lo cierto que las teorías no científicas.”
― Bertrand Russell

“We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“The root of the matter is a very simple and old fashioned thing... love or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.”
― Bertrand Russell

“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”
― Bertrand Russell

“How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”
― Bertrand Russell

“The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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, Sceptical Essays

“It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

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“Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.”
― Bertrand Russell

“There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

 “dont let the old break you; let the love make you”
― Bertrand Russell

 “How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “To speak seriously: the standards of "goodness" which are generally recognized by public opinion are not those which are calculated to make the world a happier place. This is due to a variety of causes, of which the chief is tradition, and the next most powerful is the unjust power of dominant classes.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth”
― Bertrand Russell

“A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays

  “Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opinion.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “marriage is likely to be what is called happy if niether party ever expected to get much happiness out of it”
― Bertrand Russell

 “It is for this reason that rationality is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species...even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The Church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to pride of intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Human nature being what it is, people will insist upon getting some pleasure out of life.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous, and loathed because they impose slavery.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Men have physical needs, and they have emotions. While physical needs are unsatisfied, they take first place; but when they are satisfied, emotions unconnected with them become important in deciding whether a man is to be happy or unhappy.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is”
― Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World

“A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but, by making their own vital impulses fit in with other peoples. This is feasible. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had enough to eat and drink.

I feel I shall find the truth on my deathbed and be surrounded by people too stupid to understand—fussing about medicines instead of searching for wisdom.

I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Man is a rational animal. So at least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to come across it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be - Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity - to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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, The Problems of Philosophy

“Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“The luxury to disparage freedom is the privilege of those who already possess it.”
― Bertrand Russell

“War grows out of ordinary human nature.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight

 “Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Leibniz was somewhat mean about money. When any young lady at the court of Hanover married, he used to give her what he called a "wedding present," consisting of useful maxims, ending up with the advice not to give up washing now that she had secured a husband. History does not record whether the brides were grateful. ”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth'...Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“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, The Impact of Science on Society

“Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
― Bertrand Russell

“No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.”
― Bertrand Russell,

“The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said "thou shalt not," and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “Knowledge exists, and good will exists; but both remain impotent until they possess the proper organs for making themselves heard.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

 “All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident
enabling unpopular persons to survive.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays

 “Ages of prolonged uncertainty, while they are compatible with the highest degree of saintliness in a few, are inimical to the prosaic every-day virtues of respectable citizens. There seems no use in thrift, when tomorrow all your savings may be dissipated; no advantage in honesty, when the man towards whom you practise it is pretty sure to swindle you; no point in steadfast adherence to the cause, when no cause is important or has a chance of stable victory; no argument in favour of truthfulness, when only supple tergiversation makes the preservation of life and fortune possible. The man whose virtue has no source except a purely terrestrial prudence will in such a world, become an adventurer if he has the courage, and, if not, will seek obscurity as a timid time-server.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

 “If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just be the world as God...”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

 “The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

 “There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.”
― Bertrand Russell

“what is work? 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 one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”
― Bertrand Russell, Introduzione alla filosofia matematica

“I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“There are a great many ways in which, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not entirely absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

“Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“I have been accused of a habit of changing my opinions. I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century? In science men change their opinions when new knowledge becomes available; but philosophy in the minds of many is assimilated rather to theology than to science. The kind of philosophy that I value and have endeavoured to pursue is scientific, in the sense that there is some definite knowledge to be obtained and that new discoveries can make the admission of former error inevitable to any candid mind. For what I have said, whether early or late, I do not claim the kind of truth which theologians claim for their creeds. I claim only, at best, that the opinion expressed was a sensible one to hold at the time when it was expressed. I should be much surprised if subsequent research did not show that it needed to be modified. I hope, therefore, that whoever uses this dictionary will not suppose the remarks which it quotes to be intended as pontifical pronouncements, but only as the best I could do at the time towards the promotion of clear and accurate thinking. Clarity, above all, has been my aim.”
― Bertrand Russell, Dictionary of Mind, Matter and Morals

“When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“[If] we wish to diminish the love of money which, we are told, is the root of all evil, the first step must be the creation of a system in which everyone has enough and no one has too much.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others 1: American Essays 1931-35

“To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things - this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

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

“Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.”
― Bertrand Russell

“no one ever gossips about the virtues of others”
― Bertrand Russell

“Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from three defects: it is cocksure, vague and self-contradictory. The first step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects, not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative, precise and self-consistent.”
― Bertrand Russell

 “A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however, eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor.”
― Bertrand Russell

“to be without some of the things you want is an indespensible part of happiness”
― Bertrand Russell

“One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness: And Other Essays

“Nevertheless, when it is your lot to have to endure something that is (or seems to you) worse than the ordinary lot of mankind, Spinoza's principle of thinking about the whole, or at any rate about larger matters than your own grief, is a useful one. There are even times when it is comforting to reflect that human life, with all that is contains of evil and suffering, is an infinitesimal part of the life of the universe. Such reflections may not suffice to constitute a religion, but in a painful world they are a help towards sanity and an antidote to the paralysis of utter despair. - about Spinoza”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“That is the idea - that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principle enemy of moral progress in the world.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“Religion is based primarily upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly as the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“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

 “A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“I do not think there can be any defense for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world - its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order

“Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.”
― Bertrand Russell

“In a world where there were no specifically mental facts, is it not plain that there would be a complete impartiality, an evenly diffused light, not the central illumination fading away into outer darkness, which is characteristic of objects in relation to a mind?”
― Bertrand Russell

“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
― Bertrand Russell

“We are accustomed to take progress for granted: to assume without hesitation that the changes which have happened during the last hundred years were unquestionably for the better, and that further changes for the better are sure to follow indefinitely.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“For all serious intellectual progress depends upon a certain kind of independence of outside opinion, which cannot exist where the will of the majority is treated with that kind of religious respect which the orthodox give to the will of God.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages ; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.”
― Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

“I think that in all descriptions of the good life here on earth we must assume a certain basis of animal vitality and animal instinct; without this, life becomes tame and uninteresting. Civilization should be something added to this, not substituted for it; the ascetic saint and the detached sage fail in this respect to be complete human beings. A small number of them may enrich a community; but a world composed of them would die of boredom.”
― Bertrand Russell

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Not all superstitions are dark and cruel. I once received a communication from the god Osiris. He was living at that time in a suburb of Boston.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“Very few people are able to discount the effect of circumstances upon their own characters.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore, every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?”
― Bertrand Russell

“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 very great importance.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”
― Bertrand Russell, Selected Papers

 “In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch”
― Bertrand Russell

“Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Those who have a scientific outlook on human behaviour, moreover, find it impossible to label any action as ‘sin’; they realise that what we do has its origin in our heredity, our education, and our environment, and that it is by control of these causes, rather than by denunciation, that conduct injurious to society is to be prevented.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“The problem of the social reformer, therefore, is not merely to seek means of security, for if these means when found provide no deep satisfaction the security will be thrown away for the glory of adventure.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Noone has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self-consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke’s, is more or less wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that stochastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are the philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial state.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

 “A philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything other except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

 “Man needs, for his happiness, not merely the enjoyment of this or that, but hope, and enterprise and change.”
― Bertrand Russell

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at, because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

“I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“When you hear people in church, debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“a certain amount of boredom is...essential to a happy life”
― Bertrand Russell

“The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”
― Bertrand Russell

“You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

 “When men assimilate themselves to machines and value only the consequences of their work, not the work itself, style disappears, to be replaced by something which to the mechanised man appears more natural, though in fact is only more brutal.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others 1: American Essays 1931-35

“Logic was, formerly, the art of drawing inferences; it has now become the art of abstaining from inferences, since it has appeared that the inferences we feel naturally inclined to make are hardly ever valid.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise”
― Bertrand Russell

“The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian & Other Essays on Religion & Related Subjects

“In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.”
― Bertrand Russell

“With subjectivism in philosophy, anarchism in politics goes hand in hand.

“Intelligibility or precision: to combine the two is impossible.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Knowledge, as opposed to fantasies of wish fulfilment, is difficult to come by.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is conciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man?”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“We shall be compelled to renounce the hope of finding philosophical proofs of religious beliefs. ...Hence, once more, the value of philosophy must not depend upon any supposed body of definitely ascertainable knowledge to be acquired by those who study it.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

“Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“In various ways, methods of approaching the mathematician's ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of much that was mistaken in metaphysics and theory of knowledge.”
― Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

“If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only a good ones would do it”
― Bertrand Russell

“People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other.”
― Bertrand Russell