Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

203. “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

204. “All’s well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

206. “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

207. “The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress. It’s coexistence or no existence.”

— Bertrand Russell

208. “I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.”

— Bertrand Russell

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

212. “If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”

— Bertrand Russell

213. “Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.”

— Bertrand Russell

214. “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

215. “Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

217. “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

218. “I do not believe that science per se is an adequate source of happiness, nor do I think that my own scientific outlook has contributed very greatly to my own happiness, which I attribute to defecating twice a day with unfailing regularity.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

220. “Modern definitions of truth, such as those as pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialisation as opposed to aristocracy.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

222. “The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.”

— Bertrand Russell

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as a means and human folly as an end.”

— Bertrand Russell

228. “To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.”

— Bertrand Russell

229. “What is matter? Never mind.”

— Bertrand Russell

230. “El tiempo que disfrutas perder no es tiempo perdido.”

— Bertrand Russell

231. “There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment and then nothing.”

— Bertrand Russell

232. “I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.”

— Bertrand Russell

233. “Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.”

— Bertrand Russell

234. “There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”

— Bertrand Russell

235. “My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.”

— Bertrand Russell

236. “Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.”

— Bertrand Russell

237. “There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.”

— Bertrand Russell

238. “Animal rights, taken to their logical conclusion, mean votes for oysters.”

— Bertrand Russell

239. “Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”

— Bertrand Russell

240. “Unhappy business men, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.”

— Bertrand Russell

241. “We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.”

— Bertrand Russell

242. “It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

— Bertrand Russell

243. “The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.”

— Bertrand Russell

244. “Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.”

— Bertrand Russell

245. “The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.”

— Bertrand Russell

246. “How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”

— Bertrand Russell

247. “I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.”

— Bertrand Russell

248. “When all experts agree, you need to watch out.”

— Bertrand Russell

249. “It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won’t go.”

— Bertrand Russell

250. “My first advice on how not to grow old would be to choose you ancestors carefully.”

— Bertrand Russell