Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

203. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

213. “All human activity is prompted by desire.”

— Bertrand Russell

214. “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

215. “The really useful education is that which follows the direction of the child’s own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

217. “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

218. “What is matter? Never mind.”

— Bertrand Russell

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

230. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

232. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

234. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

236. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

238. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

250. “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