Bertrand Russell

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

— Bertrand Russell

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

— Bertrand Russell

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.

— Bertrand Russell

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favor of the belief which he finds in himself.

— Bertrand Russell

What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.

— Bertrand Russell

Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— 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

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

— Bertrand Russell

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

— Bertrand Russell

All movements go too far.

— 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

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.

— Bertrand Russell

The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

— 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

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

— Bertrand Russell

Most people would rather die than think: many do.

— Bertrand Russell

All human activity is prompted by desire.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— 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

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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— 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

Folly is perennial, yet the human race has survived.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

— Bertrand Russell

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— 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

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

— Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

— Bertrand Russell

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

— Bertrand Russell

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts- the less you know the hotter you get.

— Bertrand Russell

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

— Bertrand Russell

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

— Bertrand Russell

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

— Bertrand Russell

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

— Bertrand Russell

The root of the matter the thing I mean is love, Christian 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

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

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

Mathematics, rightly viewed, poses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

— Bertrand Russell

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

— Bertrand Russell

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one that we preach, but do not practice, and another that we practice, but seldom preach.

— Bertrand Russell

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

— Bertrand Russell

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

— Bertrand Russell

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— 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

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

— Bertrand Russell

This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind.

— Bertrand Russell

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

— Bertrand Russell

Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.

— Bertrand Russell

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason ;knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.

— 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

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

— Bertrand Russell

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

— Bertrand Russell

One must care about a world one will not see.

— Bertrand Russell

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.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

— Bertrand Russell

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

— Bertrand Russell

Sin is geographical.

— Bertrand Russell

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

— Bertrand Russell

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.

— Bertrand Russell

To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.

— Bertrand Russell

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

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

— Bertrand Russell