Quotes By Bertrand Russell

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

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.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

All movements go too far.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

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.

Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.

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

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

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.

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.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.