Top 95 Bertrand Russell Quotes

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.

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

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

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

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.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

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

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

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

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

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

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

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

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who’ll get the blame.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

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

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

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

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.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

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.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.

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

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

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.

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

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

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

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

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.

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.

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.

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

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

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

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

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

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

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.

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