Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The above proposition is occasionally useful.”

— Bertrand Russell

252. “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

253. “Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

255. “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

256. “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

257. “War grows out of ordinary human nature.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

263. “There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.”

— Bertrand Russell

264. “Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.”

— Bertrand Russell

265. “It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.”

— Bertrand Russell

266. “The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century.”

— Bertrand Russell

267. “It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.”

— Bertrand Russell

268. “The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence.”

— Bertrand Russell

269. “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

— Bertrand Russell

270. “The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts ‘sins’ and others ‘virtue’ on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.”

— Bertrand Russell

271. “It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.”

— Bertrand Russell

272. “Memory demands an image.”

— Bertrand Russell

273. “When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; ‘will I be able to talk with this person into old age?’ Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation.”

— Bertrand Russell

274. “I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work.”

— Bertrand Russell

275. “It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.”

— Bertrand Russell

276. “Why do people read? The answer, as regards the great majority, is: ‘They don’t.”

— Bertrand Russell

277. “Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.”

— Bertrand Russell

278. “We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.”

— Bertrand Russell

279. “Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.”

— Bertrand Russell

280. “People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable.”

— Bertrand Russell

281. “A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.”

— Bertrand Russell

282. “If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.”

— Bertrand Russell

283. “The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.”

— Bertrand Russell

284. “Our use of phrase ‘The Dark ages’ to cover the period from 699 to 1,000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe...”

— Bertrand Russell

285. “In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.”

— Bertrand Russell

286. “I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover 25 miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed.”

— Bertrand Russell

287. “No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value.”

— Bertrand Russell

288. “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.”

— Bertrand Russell

289. “Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.”

— Bertrand Russell

290. “Ants and savages put strangers to death.”

— Bertrand Russell

291. “Envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

292. “There’s a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire – poison and antidote.”

— Bertrand Russell

293. “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”

— Bertrand Russell

294. “To choose one sock from each of infinitely many pairs of socks requires the Axiom of Choice, but for shoes the Axiom is not needed.”

— Bertrand Russell

295. “Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.”

— Bertrand Russell

296. “There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes.”

— Bertrand Russell

297. “I have sought love because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven the saints and poets have imagined.”

— Bertrand Russell

298. “When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.”

— Bertrand Russell

299. “The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.”

— Bertrand Russell

300. “Thinking you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.”

— Bertrand Russell