Bertrand Russell Quotes
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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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Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
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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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A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.
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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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Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
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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 fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
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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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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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Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
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Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
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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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Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
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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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Why? Surely they can find other men.
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I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty.
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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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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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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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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.