Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as a means and human folly as an end.”

— Bertrand Russell

202. “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

203. “You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.”

— Bertrand Russell

204. “What is matter? Never mind.”

— Bertrand Russell

205. “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”

— Bertrand Russell

206. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

208. “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

209. “I have come to realize that an early symptom of approaching mental illness is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. If you consider your work very important you should take a day off.”

— Bertrand Russell

210. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

215. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

224. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

228. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

231. “In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.”

— Bertrand Russell

232. “When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.”

— Bertrand Russell

233. “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

— Bertrand Russell

234. “Great God in Boots! – the ontological argument is sound!”

— Bertrand Russell

235. “The above proposition is occasionally useful.”

— Bertrand Russell

236. “HELL: A place where the police are German, the motorists French and the cooks English.”

— Bertrand Russell

237. “I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.”

— Bertrand Russell

238. “Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.”

— Bertrand Russell

239. “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

240. “Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”

— Bertrand Russell

241. “The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.”

— Bertrand Russell

242. “For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family.”

— Bertrand Russell

243. “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

244. “A fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible.”

— Bertrand Russell

245. “Drunkeness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

246. “If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.”

— Bertrand Russell

247. “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

248. “Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?”

— Bertrand Russell

249. “The best practical advice I can give to the present generation is to practice the virtue which the Christians call love.”

— Bertrand Russell

250. “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in the organised diminution of work.”

— Bertrand Russell