Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.”

— Bertrand Russell

152. “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.”

— Bertrand Russell

153. “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.”

— Bertrand Russell

154. “The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

— Bertrand Russell

155. “Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

157. “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

158. “Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened, but do not be silenced.”

— Bertrand Russell

159. “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

160. “Answering questions is a major part of sex education. Two rules cover the ground. First, always give a truthful answer to a question; secondly, regard sex knowledge as exactly like any other knowledge.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

165. “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

166. “Envy is the basis of democracy.”

— Bertrand Russell

167. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

175. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

177. “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

178. “I am firm; YOU are obstinate; HE is a pig-headed fool.”

— Bertrand Russell

179. “Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.”

— Bertrand Russell

180. “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

181. “The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

— Bertrand Russell

182. “Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.”

— Bertrand Russell

183. “Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

189. “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.”

— Bertrand Russell

190. “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

191. “A man without a bias cannot write interesting history – if indeed such a man exists.”

— Bertrand Russell

192. “Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

196. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

199. “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

200. “And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.”

— Bertrand Russell