Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Even if we could be certain that one of the world’s religions were perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability.”

— Bertrand Russell

152. “No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?”

— Bertrand Russell

153. “Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion go hand in hand.”

— Bertrand Russell

154. “The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.”

— Bertrand Russell

155. “The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.”

— Bertrand Russell

156. “Envy is the basis of democracy.”

— Bertrand Russell

157. “Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else.”

— Bertrand Russell

158. “The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.”

— Bertrand Russell

159. “Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is as necessary for a good life as the head.”

— Bertrand Russell

160. “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”

— Bertrand Russell

161. “The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.”

— Bertrand Russell

162. “There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.”

— Bertrand Russell

163. “Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”

— Bertrand Russell

164. “Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”

— Bertrand Russell

165. “The luxury to disparage freedom is the privilege of those who already possess it.”

— Bertrand Russell

166. “It’s easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.”

— Bertrand Russell

167. “I think modern educational theorists are inclined to attach too much importance to the negative virtue of not interfering with children, and too little to the positive merit of enjoying their company.”

— Bertrand Russell

168. “Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.”

— Bertrand Russell

169. “If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.”

— Bertrand Russell

170. “A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.”

— Bertrand Russell

171. “Logic must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can.”

— Bertrand Russell

172. “Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.”

— Bertrand Russell

173. “The purpose of education is to teach a defense against eloquence.”

— Bertrand Russell

174. “Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.”

— Bertrand Russell

175. “Formality Thus the absence of all mention of particular things or properties in logic or pure mathematics is a necessary result of the fact that this study is, as we say, “purely formal”.”

— Bertrand Russell

176. “The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.”

— Bertrand Russell

177. “Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.”

— Bertrand Russell

178. “Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.”

— Bertrand Russell

179. “Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

— Bertrand Russell

180. “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”

— Bertrand Russell

181. “The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.”

— Bertrand Russell

182. “All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.”

— Bertrand Russell

183. “If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.”

— Bertrand Russell

184. “Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.”

— Bertrand Russell

185. “Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.”

— Bertrand Russell

186. “If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.”

— Bertrand Russell

187. “Will machines destroy emotions or will emotions destroy machines?”

— Bertrand Russell

188. “Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.”

— Bertrand Russell

189. “Escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.”

— Bertrand Russell

190. “Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”

— Bertrand Russell

191. “To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.”

— Bertrand Russell

192. “The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.”

— Bertrand Russell

193. “Skilled work, of no matter what kind, is only done well by those who take a certain pleasure in it, quite apart from its utility, either to themselves in earning a living, or to the world through its outcome.”

— Bertrand Russell

194. “Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”

— Bertrand Russell

195. “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 poetry.”

— Bertrand Russell

196. “All religions are both harmful and untrue.”

— Bertrand Russell

197. “I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.”

— Bertrand Russell

198. “Advocates of capitalism are very apt 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

199. “The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held; instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”

— Bertrand Russell

200. “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.”

— Bertrand Russell