Bertrand Russell, A History Of Western Philosophy Quotes

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.

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

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.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.

The problem of finding a collection of “wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.

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 great importance.