Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.”

— Bertrand Russell

402. “Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.”

— Bertrand Russell

403. “When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.”

— Bertrand Russell

404. “What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

— Bertrand Russell

405. “It would have been very much better for the world if Britain had remained neutral and the Germans had won a quick victory. We should not have had either the Nazis or the Communists if that had happened.”

— Bertrand Russell

406. “Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.”

— Bertrand Russell

407. “Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe.”

— Bertrand Russell

408. “There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.”

— Bertrand Russell

409. “Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.”

— Bertrand Russell

410. “If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.”

— Bertrand Russell

411. “This seems plainly absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. One.”

— Bertrand Russell

412. “If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?”

— Bertrand Russell

413. “The frequency with which a man experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasion which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he is accustomed.”

— Bertrand Russell

414. “A widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.”

— Bertrand Russell

415. “Analytic It is clear that the definition of “logic” or “mathematics” must be sought by trying to give a new definition of the old notion of “analytic” propositions.”

— Bertrand Russell

416. “The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.”

— Bertrand Russell

417. “The essence of education is that it is a change effected in the organism to satisfy the operator.”

— Bertrand Russell

418. “We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love.”

— Bertrand Russell

419. “As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me.”

— Bertrand Russell

420. “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

— Bertrand Russell

421. “Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.”

— Bertrand Russell

422. “My doctor said to me afterwards, ‘When you were ill you behaved like a true philosopher. Every time you came to yourself you made a joke.’ I never had a compliment that pleased me more.”

— Bertrand Russell

423. “I’ve always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.”

— Bertrand Russell

424. “Philosophy is no longer the pillar of fire going before a few intrepid seekers after truth: it is rather an ambulance following in the wake of the struggle for existence and picking up the weak and wounded.”

— Bertrand Russell

425. “Among the Tibetans, one wife has many husbands, because men are too poor to support a whole wife.”

— Bertrand Russell

426. “The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in the Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.”

— Bertrand Russell

427. “The Roman soldier who killed Archimedes was a symbol of the death of original thought that Rome caused throughout the Hellenic world.”

— Bertrand Russell

428. “I suppose the advocates of unreason think that there is a better chance of profitably deceiving the populace if they keep it in a state of effervescence.”

— Bertrand Russell

429. “The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.”

— Bertrand Russell

430. “The desire for legitimate offspring is, in fact, according to the Catholic Church, the only motive which can justify sexual intercourse.”

— Bertrand Russell

431. “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?”

— Bertrand Russell

432. “I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.”

— Bertrand Russell

433. “One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.”

— Bertrand Russell

434. “Worry is a form of fear.”

— Bertrand Russell

435. “The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.”

— Bertrand Russell

436. “The problem of political theory is how to combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress, with the degree of social cohesion which is necessary for survival.”

— Bertrand Russell

437. “Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?”

— Bertrand Russell

438. “Although personal survival after death is an illusion, there is nevertheless something in the human mind that is eternal.”

— Bertrand Russell

439. “If the Church is not now as bad as the Soviet Government, that is due to the influence of those who attacked the Church.”

— Bertrand Russell

440. “The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it.”

— Bertrand Russell

441. “What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.”

— Bertrand Russell

442. “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

443. “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

444. “The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own.”

— Bertrand Russell

445. “My advice to anyone who wishes to write is to know all the very best literature by heart, and ignore the rest as completely as possible.”

— Bertrand Russell

446. “You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.”

— Bertrand Russell

447. “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

— Bertrand Russell

448. “From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary...”

— Bertrand Russell

449. “Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.”

— Bertrand Russell

450. “If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?”

— Bertrand Russell