Bertrand Russell Quotes
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The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
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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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The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call 'particulars' – such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things – and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.
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I regard religion as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
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The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
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If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.
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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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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.
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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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Why? Surely they can find other men.
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Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
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Yes, if you happen to be interested in philosophy and good at it, but not otherwise – but so does bricklaying. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
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Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
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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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If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless.
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The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
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I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty.
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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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The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
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We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
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In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.
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Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.