Quotes By Bertrand Russell

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.