Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.”

— Bertrand Russell

352. “Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.”

— Bertrand Russell

353. “A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”

— Bertrand Russell

354. “Civilization checks impulse not only through forethought, which is a self-administered check, but also through law, custom, and religion.”

— Bertrand Russell

355. “The method of “postulating” what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.”

— Bertrand Russell

356. “I feel as if one would only discover on one’s death bed what one ought to have lived for.”

— Bertrand Russell

357. “Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.”

— Bertrand Russell

358. “Change is one thing, progress is another.”

— Bertrand Russell

359. “The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.”

— Bertrand Russell

360. “Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any “great ideal” which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.”

— Bertrand Russell

361. “We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.”

— Bertrand Russell

362. “Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.”

— Bertrand Russell

363. “I can’t tell whether I am living in a dream or a nightmare.”

— Bertrand Russell

364. “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

— Bertrand Russell

365. “We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.”

— Bertrand Russell

366. “A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.”

— Bertrand Russell

367. “Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.”

— Bertrand Russell

368. “Psychology often becomes the disease of which it should be the cure.”

— Bertrand Russell

369. “You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning.”

— Bertrand Russell

370. “Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.”

— Bertrand Russell

371. “Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety.”

— Bertrand Russell

372. “The lunatic who believes he is a poached egg, is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in a minority. Or rather, since we must not assume democracy, on the ground that the government disagrees with him.”

— Bertrand Russell

373. “The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.”

— Bertrand Russell

374. “What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.”

— Bertrand Russell

375. “The taboo against nakedness is an obstacle to a decent attitude on the subject of sex.”

— Bertrand Russell

376. “The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms.”

— Bertrand Russell

377. “Every increase in knowledge requires an increase in wisdom.”

— Bertrand Russell

378. “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

379. “Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”

— Bertrand Russell

380. “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.”

— Bertrand Russell

381. “Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”

— Bertrand Russell

382. “All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties.”

— Bertrand Russell

383. “Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don’t like the way things are, they aren’t interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.”

— Bertrand Russell

384. “With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.”

— Bertrand Russell

385. “Emphatic and reiterated assertion, especially during childhood, produces in most people a belief so firm as to have a hold even over the unconscious.”

— Bertrand Russell

386. “Upon hearing via Littlewood an exposition on the theory of relativity: To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.”

— Bertrand Russell

387. “Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opinion.”

— Bertrand Russell

388. “The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.”

— Bertrand Russell

389. “Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself.”

— Bertrand Russell

390. “I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.”

— Bertrand Russell

391. “My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they’re not really interested in.”

— Bertrand Russell

392. “Drunkenness is temporary suicide.”

— Bertrand Russell

393. “Measures of sterilization should, in my opinion, be very definitely confined to persons who are mentally defective.”

— Bertrand Russell

394. “Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.”

— Bertrand Russell

395. “Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.”

— Bertrand Russell

396. “No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.”

— Bertrand Russell

397. “Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.”

— Bertrand Russell

398. “You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought.”

— Bertrand Russell

399. “Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.”

— Bertrand Russell

400. “What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.”

— Bertrand Russell