Top 1204 Quotes & Sayings by Bertrand Russell
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British celebrity Bertrand Russell.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
All movements go too far.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
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.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
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.
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