Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.”

— Bertrand Russell

452. “When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.”

— Bertrand Russell

453. “They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. Those who continually search for happiness will never find it. Happiness is made, not found. To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

454. “There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes.”

— Bertrand Russell

455. “The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.”

— Bertrand Russell

456. “Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable.”

— Bertrand Russell

457. “The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.”

— Bertrand Russell

458. “One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did.”

— Bertrand Russell

459. “Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment.”

— Bertrand Russell

460. “Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.”

— Bertrand Russell

461. “A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.”

— Bertrand Russell

462. “Unrestricted nationalism is, in the long run, incompatible with world peace.”

— Bertrand Russell

463. “This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.”

— Bertrand Russell

464. “The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.”

— Bertrand Russell

465. “To be out of harmony with one’s surroundings is of course a misfortune, but it is not always a misfortune to be avoided at all costs. Where the environment is stupid or prejudiced or cruel, it is a sign of merit to be out of harmony with it.”

— Bertrand Russell

466. “Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.”

— Bertrand Russell

467. “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

468. “The Axiom of Choice is necessary to select a set from an infinite number of socks, but not an infinite number of shoes.”

— Bertrand Russell

469. “So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.”

— Bertrand Russell

470. “Intelligence, it might be said, has caused our troubles; but it is not unintelligence that will cure them. Only more and wiser intelligence can make a happier world.”

— Bertrand Russell

471. “It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world.”

— Bertrand Russell

472. “There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.”

— Bertrand Russell

473. “The white tails of rabbits, according to some theologians, have a purpose, namely to make it easier for sportsmen to shoot them.”

— Bertrand Russell

474. “We have seen that monarchy and oligarchy have both merits and demerits. The principal demerit of both is that, sooner or later, the government becomes so indifferent to the desires of ordinary men that there is revolution.”

— Bertrand Russell

475. “Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.”

— Bertrand Russell

476. “What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.”

— Bertrand Russell

477. “Love as a relation between men and women was ruined by the desire to make sure of the legitimacy of children.”

— Bertrand Russell

478. “Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires.”

— Bertrand Russell

479. “I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer.”

— Bertrand Russell

480. “Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.”

— Bertrand Russell

481. “Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens.”

— Bertrand Russell

482. “Vanity is a motive of immense potency.”

— Bertrand Russell

483. “That Plato’s Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.”

— Bertrand Russell

484. “It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know-or care-about circumstances in the colonies.”

— Bertrand Russell

485. “Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.”

— Bertrand Russell

486. “Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.”

— Bertrand Russell

487. “Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.”

— Bertrand Russell

488. “For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.”

— Bertrand Russell

489. “Uncertainty in the pressure of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.”

— Bertrand Russell

490. “Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events.”

— Bertrand Russell

491. “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.”

— Bertrand Russell

492. “Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell.”

— Bertrand Russell

493. “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.”

— Bertrand Russell

494. “Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.”

— Bertrand Russell

495. “The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they ‘really’ have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.”

— Bertrand Russell

496. “Patriotism which has the quality of intoxication is a danger not only to its native land but to the world, and “My country never wrong” is an even more dangerous maxim than “My country, right or wrong.””

— Bertrand Russell

497. “The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.”

— Bertrand Russell

498. “It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.”

— Bertrand Russell

499. “Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.”

— Bertrand Russell

500. “All forms of fear produce fatigue.”

— Bertrand Russell