Bertrand Russell Quotes
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Most people, at a crisis, feel more loyalty to their nation than to their class.
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I must confess that I am deeply troubled. I fear that human beings are intent upon acting out a vast deathwish and that it lies with us now to make every effort to promote resistance to the insanity and brutality of policies which encompass the extermination of hundreds of millions of human beings.
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Our words tend to conceal what is private and particular in our impressions, and to make us believe that different people live in a common world to a greater extent than is in fact the case.
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Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.
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I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.
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I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.
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The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
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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.
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The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...
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All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.
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In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.
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I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability.
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When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe, and still more unable to wish to discern one.
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Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.
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There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.
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I cannot believe – and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable – that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.
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Power may be defined as the production of intended effects.
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The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.
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A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
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It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. The difference is that you can compel your car to go to a garage, but you cannot compel Hitler to go to a psychiatrist.
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Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The End.
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Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure...
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Friends,
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The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.