Bertrand Russell quote: "Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me."

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be belie...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and s...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the s...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than c...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on t...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me,
and I found myself in quite another region. BERTRAND RUSSELL

The root of the matter the thing I mean is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you feel this, yo...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intel...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate gov...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts- the less you know t...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundame...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Food has replaced sex in my life, now I can't even get into my own pants
BERTRAND RUSSELL

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent
BERTRAND RUSSELL

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and f...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the si...
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...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for examp...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far b...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death. Thought is ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Thoughts is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privileg...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

With civilized men..., it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud w...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
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 hap...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more tha...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and fem...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun...
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 wearine...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night an...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endure...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is much pleasure ot be gained from useless knowledge.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The difficulty is old, but none the less real. An omnipotent being who created a world containing ev...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of p...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

All movements go too far, and this is certainly true of the movement toward subjectivity, whi...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will sea...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

What makes a belief true or false I call a fact. The particular fact that makes a given belief true ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously tran...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the i...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnecte...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

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

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, li...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whet...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchston...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but e...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Three passions simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the se...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to ea...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the poss...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves a...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to en...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translate...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: ins...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

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

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to deman...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably lea...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literat...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

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

The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin ...
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 ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from w...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

An individual human existence should be like a river
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up frie...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which morali...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard su...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are ha...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this d...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintell...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Change is one thing, progress is another. Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indub...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

One must care about a world one will not see.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he fi...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against nature.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Most people would rather die than think: many do.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginar...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the poss...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew. They're what make the...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Sin is geographical.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.Watch your words, for they become actions.Watch your acti...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no lon...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to d...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very fe...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodi...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, pain of love lasts a lifetime.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life w...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is off...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of p...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

An educator should think of a child as a garderner thinks of a plant, as something to be made to gro...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful, and valued because they confer power; they are ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and a...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they inven...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought o...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate gov...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape f...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can ...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying t...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface rela...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ide...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

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

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the i...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not reg...
BERTRAND RUSSELL

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

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Bertrand Russell

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

Bertrand Russell

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