Quotes by Russell, Bertrand

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

Russell, Bertrand on death
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"Most people would rather die than think: many do."

Russell, Bertrand on death
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"All human activity is prompted by desire."

Russell, Bertrand on desire   

"Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man."

Russell, Bertrand on detail   

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

Russell, Bertrand on doubt
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"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."

Russell, Bertrand on doubt
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"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."

Russell, Bertrand on duty   

"To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy."

Russell, Bertrand on eloquence   

"We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs."

Russell, Bertrand on emotions   

"In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors."

Russell, Bertrand on equality   

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

Russell, Bertrand on ethics   

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

Russell, Bertrand on evolution   

"An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet."

Russell, Bertrand on evolution   

"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."

Russell, Bertrand on experience   

"Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken."

Russell, Bertrand on experts
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"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."

Russell, Bertrand on facts   

"With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine."

Russell, Bertrand on farming and farmers   

"The fundamental defect with fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them."

Russell, Bertrand on fathers   

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

Russell, Bertrand on fear   

"Folly is perennial, yet the human race has survived."

Russell, Bertrand on fools and foolishness   

"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

Russell, Bertrand on fools and foolishness
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"Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure."

Russell, Bertrand on freedom   

"Drunkenness is temporary suicide."

Russell, Bertrand on alcohol and alcoholism
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"No one gossips about other people's secret virtues."

Russell, Bertrand on gossip   

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action."

Russell, Bertrand on government   

"To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness   

"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness   

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

Russell, Bertrand on happiness   

"Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness
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"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."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness
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"Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness
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"The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness
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"The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness
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"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

Russell, Bertrand on happiness
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"Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected."

Russell, Bertrand on hatred   

"One of the signs of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."

Russell, Bertrand on health
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"Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery."

Russell, Bertrand on hope
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"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education."

Russell, Bertrand on ignorance
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"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it."

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

Russell, Bertrand on importance