Bertrand Russell Quotes
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I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.
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Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
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The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite.
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A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress – though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.
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Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.
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Why? Surely they can find other men.
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Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
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A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.
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Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.
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It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.
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I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.
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An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.
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It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
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When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
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There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
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In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.
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I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times – you more than I, because you have no children.
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The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.
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Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don’t know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.
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In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.
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There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
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It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.
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Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
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Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.