Bertrand Russell Quotes

People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.

Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

RELIGION: A set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual.

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just be the world as God.

Unrestricted nationalism is, in the long run, incompatible with world peace.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

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

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

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

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.

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.

Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.

The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.

Love cannot exists as a duty; to tell a child that it ought to love its parents and its brother and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse.

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

A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.

It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion.

One must care about a world one will not see.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

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.

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?

Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced.

Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest.

What is matter? Never mind.

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell

One of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence

Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know.

[One] must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

I FIND IT SO DIFFICULT NOT TO HATE, WHEN I DO NOT HATE I FEEL WE FEW ARE SO LONELY IN THE WORLD

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.