Bertrand Russell Quotes

I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called 'education.'

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit; divorced from it, they remain barren.

The . . . increase in the power of officials is a constant source of irritation to everybody else.

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 georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, 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.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.

Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

The discipline in your life should be one determined by your own desires and your own needs, not put upon you by society or authority.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.

The institution of representative government to us seems an essential part of democracy, but the ancients never thought of it. Its immense merit was that it enabled a large constituency to exert indirect power, and thus made possible the distribution of political responsibility throughout the great states of modern times.

Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable.

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

If the Church is not now as bad as the Soviet Government, that is due to the influence of those who attacked the Church

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake.

The puritanism of Christianity has played havoc with the moderation that an enlightened and tolerant critical spirit would have produced. I've noticed that in whatever country, county, town, or other region there is a regulation enjoining temperance, the population seems to be entirely composed of teetotallers and drunkards. There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood.

Organized people are just too lazy to look for things

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Cruel men believe in a cruel god and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly god, and they would be kindly in any case.

It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare.

Cruelty is, in theory, a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.

Writing can be either readable or precise, but not at the same time.

The best practical advice I can give to the present generation is to practice the virtue which the Christians call love.

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

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.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.

Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society.

Diversity is essential to happiness and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect in all planned social systems.

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

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.

I FIND IT SO DIFFICULT NOT TO HATE, WHEN I DO NOT HATE I FEEL WE FEW ARE SO LONELY IN THE WORLD

Unhappy business men, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.

From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary.

Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from three defects: it is cocksure, vague and self-contradictory. The first step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects, not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative, precise and self-consistent.

The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.

Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization.

Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless.

In spreading his ideas, Plato was willing to employ emotional appeals, state propaganda, and the use of force.

The evolution of our spirit is blazed on the dark background of eternity by our individual wakes. Every person can, if he/she wishes, leave a more or less brilliant wake behind them.

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