Quotes By Bertrand Russell

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

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

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

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

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

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.