Famous Quotes

Quotes by Bertrand Russell

• Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
• Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
• 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.
• Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
• Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
• Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
• 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.
• Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
• None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
• Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
• One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
• Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
• Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
• Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
• Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
• Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
• So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
• 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.
• The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
• The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
• The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
• 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.
• The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
• The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
• 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.
• The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
• The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
• The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.
• The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.