Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

404. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

415. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

422. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

427. “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

428. “Worry is a form of fear.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Bertrand Russell

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “Cruel men believe in a cruel god and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly god, and they would be kindly in any case.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

442. “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

443. “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

444. “Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”

— Bertrand Russell

445. “The teacher, like the artist and the philosopher, can perform his work adequately only if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.”

— Bertrand Russell

446. “The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.”

— Bertrand Russell

447. “Aristotle’s metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily.”

— Bertrand Russell

448. “If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.”

— Bertrand Russell

449. “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

450. “Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken.”

— Bertrand Russell