Bertrand Russell

Quotes

• “Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most...”
• “When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than...”
• “When I say that children should be told about sex, I do not mean that they should be told only the bare physiological fa...”
• “In former days, men sold themselves to the Devil to acquire magical powers. Nowadays they acquire those powers from scie...”
• “I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beau...”
• “In fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to...”
• “There is a further advantage [to hydrogen bombs]: the supply of uranium in the planet is very limited, and it might be f...”
• “I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have real...”
• “There was once a millionaire who bought an infinite number of pairs of shoes and, whenever he bought a pair of shoes, he...”
• “As an undergraduate I was a member of the Voltaire Society, and we used to have dinner with Bertrand Russell, and he was...”
• “The criminal law has, from the point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those impulses of a...”
• “I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism - both untrue and ...”
• “The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique....”
• “We are thus led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction i...”
• “People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true,...”
• “To those who inquire as to the purpose of mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making of machin...”
• “The harm that is done by a religion is of two sorts, the one depending on the kind of belief which it is thought ought t...”
• “I would have liked to convince my father that I had found what he had been looking for, the ineffable something he had l...”
• “A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warr...”
• “We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequenc...”
• “No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute ...”
• “[Freedom] is the greatest of political goods. I do not say freedom is the greatest of all goods: the best things come fr...”
• “For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of pr...”
• “Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the...”
• “I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing ...”
• “Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and We...”
• “I quite understand the principle of confining employment as far as possible to the British without regard for efficiency...”
• “Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a ...”
• “An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across a...”
• “Thank you for your letter and for the enclosure which I return herewith. I have been wondering whether there is any mean...”
• “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of c...”
• “The conviction that it is important to believe this or that, even if a free inquiry would not support the belief, is one...”
• “There is a connected set of events (light-waves) travelling outward from a centre... there are some respects in which al...”
• “The first thing to realize, if you wish to become a philosopher, is that most people go through life with a whole world ...”
• “Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, bu...”
• “A fundamental economic reconstruction, bringing with it very far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and feeling, in ph...”
• “We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one spea...”
• “Letter to Walter Ulbricht, January 7, 1964. Russell would later write, in his autobiography: "The abduction and imprison...”
• “It must not be supposed that this conflict is, on the part of the Teuton, aggressive in substance, whatever it may be in...”
• “The Chinese are a great nation, incapable of permanent suppression by foreigners. They will not consent to adopt our vic...”
• “I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slau...”
• “There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it the...”
• “I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fat...”
• “There are some simple maxims [...] which I think might be commanded to writers of expository prose. First: never use a l...”
• “We later learned that all the nineteen passengers in the non-smoking compartment had been killed. When the plane had hit...”
• “Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to spea...”
• “The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a pri...”
• “The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbue...”
• “I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems wo...”
• “This is the great paradox of Russell. All his instincts were on the side of the "rationalists"; his greatest hatred was ...”