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 Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at ...
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 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