Bertrand Russell Quotes

( Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. Bertrand Russell was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed free trade and anti-imperialism. Russell went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Bertrand Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 20th century. Bertrand Russell is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein. )

1. I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.
    
2. Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
    
3. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.
    
4. Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
    
5. The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
    
6. It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
    
7. To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
    
8. Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
    
9. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
    
10. The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation.
     
11. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
     
12. I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
     
13. This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind.
     
14. The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
     
15. The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
     
16. Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.
     
17. Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.
     
18. Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.
     
19. Pythagoras... was intellectually one of the most important men that ever lived... Mathematics, in the sense of demonstrative deductive argument, begins with him, and in him is intimately connected with a peculiar form of mysticism. The influence of mathematics on philosophy, partly owing to him, has, ever since his time, been both profound and unfortunate.
     
20. Heraclitus repeatedly speaks of "God" as distinct from "the gods." ...God, no doubt, is the embodiment of cosmic justice.
     
21. Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
     
22. There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
     
23. The businessman's religion and glory demand that he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers the torment gladly.
     
24. One should 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.
     
25. No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
     
26. Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.
     
27. Most literary men is obsessed with the idea that science has not fulfilled its promises. They do not, of course, tell us what these promises were. This is an entire delusion, fostered by those writers and clergymen who do not wish their specialties to be thought of little value.