Bertrand Russell Quotes
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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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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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It is generally admitted that most grown-up people, however regrettably, will try to have a good time.
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All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in infering that he is an inexact man.
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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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If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless.
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Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.
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A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.
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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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An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.
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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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Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
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Why? Surely they can find other men.
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No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
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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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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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Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
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When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
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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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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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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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Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
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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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There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.