Bertrand Russell Quotes

No opinion has ever been too errant to become a creed.

Memory demands an image.

What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men that comes chiefly through their work.

Some people would rather die than think.

There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Televison allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

dont let the old break you; let the love make you

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.

Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opinion.

Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents

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.

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

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.

Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice

Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Modern definitions of truth, such as those as pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialisation as opposed to aristocracy.

The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading

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.

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.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.

We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word.

Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.

HELL: A place where the police are German, the motorists French and the cooks English.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death.

Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do.

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.

I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.