Bertrand Russell Quotes
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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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To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.
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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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Friends,
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It's not the experience that happens to you: it's what you do with the experience that happens to you.
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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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If the Communists conquered the world, it would be very unpleasant for a while, but not forever. But if the human race is wiped out, that is the end.
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The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts – the less you know the hotter you get.
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I've got a one-dimensional mind.
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In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.
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What does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the non-existent.
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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.
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First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
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Competition for power is of two sorts: between organizations, and between individuals for leadership within an organization.
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No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.
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Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.
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There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
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The state is primarily an organization for killing foreigners.
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The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one – particularly if he plays golf, which he usually does.
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The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.
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Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
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In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.
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I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.
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The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.