Bertrand Russell Quotes - Page 2

Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty.
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.
Bertrand Russell
What hunger is in relation to food zest is in relation to life.
Bertrand Russell
The true spirit of delight the exultation the sense of being more than Man which is the touchstone of the highest excellence is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Bertrand Russell
To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization.
Bertrand Russell
Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
Bertrand Russell
To teach how to live with uncertainty yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.
Bertrand Russell
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision and nothing is so futile.
Bertrand Russell
Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.
Bertrand Russell
Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
Bertrand Russell
The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.
Bertrand Russell
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard chiefly I think because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Bertrand Russell
Every man wherever he goes is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Bertrand Russell
To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement.
Bertrand Russell
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
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.
Bertrand Russell
Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture.
Bertrand Russell
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Bertrand Russell
Those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren.
Bertrand Russell
The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.
Bertrand Russell
Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.
Bertrand Russell
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Bertrand Russell
The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.
Bertrand Russell
The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political skeptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time.
Bertrand Russell
The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the experts consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others.
Bertrand Russell
The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.
Bertrand Russell
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches. Imagine a modern American publisher confronted with the Old Testament as a new manuscript submitted to him for the first time. It is not difficult to think what his comments would be, for example, on the genealogies. 'My dear sir,' he would say, 'this chapter lacks pep; you can't expect your reader to be interested in a mere string of proper names of persons about whom you tell so little. You have begun your story, I admit, in fine style, and at first I was very favourably impressed, but you have altogether too much wish to tell it all. Pick out the highlights, take out the superfluous matter, and bring me back your manuscript when you have reduced it to a reasonable length.' So the modern publisher would speak, knowing the modern reader's fear of boredom.
Bertrand Russell
Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.
Bertrand Russell
Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one’s own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.
Bertrand Russell
The instinct is not completely satisfied unless a man's whole being, mental quite as much as physical, enters into the relation. Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give; unconsciously, if not consciously, they feel this and the resulting disappointment inclines them towards envy, oppression, and cruelty.
Bertrand Russell
Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.
Bertrand Russell
From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution...It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation.
Bertrand Russell
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
Bertrand Russell
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.
Bertrand Russell
Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform.
Bertrand Russell
A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...
Bertrand Russell
And always, in our highly regularised way of life, he is obsessed by thoughts of themorrow. Of all the precepts in the Gospels the one that Christians have most neglected is the commandment to take no thought for the morrow. If a man is prudent, thought for the morrow will lead him to save; if he is imprudent, it will make him apprehensive of being unable to pay his debts. In either case the moment loses its savour. Everything is organised, nothing is spontaneous.
Bertrand Russell
But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the ‘next thing’ is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed.
Bertrand Russell
For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.
Bertrand Russell
Advocates of capitalism like to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
Bertrand Russell
Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell
Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way
Bertrand Russell
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
Bertrand Russell
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.
Bertrand Russell
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.
Bertrand Russell
Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce ‘proofs’ of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors — Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' — but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.
Bertrand Russell
The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other.
Bertrand Russell
All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?
Bertrand Russell
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.
Bertrand Russell
There is another more psychological obstacle to the full development of love in the modern world, and that is the fear that many people feel of not preserving their individuality in tact. This is a foolish and rather modern terror. Individuality is not an end in itself; it is something that must enter into fructifying contact with the world, and in so doing must lose its separateness. An individuality which is kept in a glass case withers, whereas on e that is freely expended in human contacts becomes enriched.
Bertrand Russell
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn
Bertrand Russell
I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.
Bertrand Russell
I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.
Bertrand Russell
Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.
Bertrand Russell