Bertrand Russel Quotations

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action

What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

There are no better friends than those forged through honest and often heated argument.

The professional moralist in our day is a man of less than average intelligence

The professors must not prevent us from realizing that history is fun, and that the most bizarre things really happen

Man is a feeble creature, to whom only submission and worship are besoming. Pride is insolence, and belief in human power is impiety

Life is a brief, small, and transitory phenomenon in an obscure corner, not at all the sort of thing that one would make a fuss about if one were not personally concerned

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

Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world

Sex outside marriage is sin; sex within marriage is not sin.

Since evolution became fashionable, the glorification of Man has taken a new form.

Most people would rather die than think: many do.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

Men, quite ordinary men, will compel children to look on while their mothers are raped. In pursuit of political aims men will submit their opponents to long years of unspeakable anguish

One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny

One occasion for theological intervention to prevent the mitigation of human suffering was the discovery of anesthetics

If we could all live solitary and without labor, we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators

I am a firm believer in democratic representative government as the best form for those who have the tolerance and self-restraint that is required to make it workable

Furious at his own misery, he sought the cause in the misdeeds of other men, and turned upon them in savage battle, thus magnifying a thousand times the ills that Nature has provide

God is a reality of spirit... He cannot... be conceived as an object, not even as the very highest object. God is not to be found in the world of objects.

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

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.

It is only the intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling

It is illegal in England to state in print that a wife can and should derive sexual pleasure from intercourse

I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people can descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours

Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.

Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture

Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true

Mankind . . . are a mistake. The universe would be sweeter and fresher without them

Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness

Whether artificial man will be better or worse than the natural sort I do not venture to predict.

Those who first advocated religious toleration were thought wicked, and so were the early opponents of slavery.

To be worthy of the name, he must be free of two things; the force of tradition and tyranny of his own passions.

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

The Platonic Socrates was a pattern to subsequent Philosophers for many ages. As a man, we may believe him admitted to the communion of saints; but as a philosopher he needs a long residence in a scientific purgatory

We must care about the world of our children and grandchildren, a world we may never see.

Undoubtedly the desire for food has been, and still is, one of the main causes of great political events

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 do for those who study it

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness

The splendor of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance

Rules of conduct, whatever they may be are not sufficient to produce good results unless the ends sought are good

Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic.

specially in males. I suppose that in the hunting stage it was more easily gratified than it has been since. The chase was exciting, war was exciting, courtship was exciting. A savage would manage to commit adultery with a woman while her husband is

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

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations

You must not kill your neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism

Young men and young women meet each other with much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel

This is a pretty fable, and I will not deny that it is logically possible, but that is the utmost that I will concede.

The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms.

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

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere tabus, and substitute divine commands and prohibitions

Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.

The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.

The need for prostitution arises from the fact that many men are either unmarried or away from their wives on journeys, that such men are not content to remain continent, and that in a conventionally virtuous community they do not find respectable women.

The conscientious Radical is faced with great difficulties. He knows that he can increase his popularity by being false to his creed, and appealing to hatreds that have nothing to do with the reforms in which he believes

In all affairs, love, religion, politics, or business, it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who

In order to be happy we require all kinds of supports to our self-esteem. We are human beings, therefore human beings are the purpose of god's creation

Before World War I one of the objections commonly urged against votes for women was that women would tend to be pacifists. During the war they gave a large-scale refutation of this charge, and the vote was given to them for their share in the bloody

By religion I mean 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

For my part, I find even eternal damnation less incredible, certainly less ridiculous, than this lame and impotent conclusion which we are asked to admire as the supreme effort of Omnipotence

I believe in using words, not fists... I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

He can have few rivals in the courage and integrity and complete self-abnegation with which he has given up his own career (in which, however, he still remains eminent) to devote himself to combating the nuclear peril as well as other, allied evils.

The man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man; neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for a man

This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind.

All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing

The increase of organization has brought into existence new positions of power. Every body has to have executive officials, in whom, at any moment, its power is concentrated. It is true that officials are usually subject to control, but the control m

The idea that men are God's children is one which cannot be conveyed to the Trobriand Islanders, since they do not think that anybody is the child of any male

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

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

The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards the members of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if he had to prosper, it must, to some