Bertrand Russell quotes

“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.”

— Bertrand Russell

“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

“I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”

— Bertrand Russell

“If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

“A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.”

— Bertrand Russell

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”

— Bertrand Russell

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.”

— Bertrand Russell

“A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.”

— Bertrand Russell

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.”

— Bertrand Russell

“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

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

— Bertrand Russell

“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

“Drunkenness is temporary suicide.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

“The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”

— Bertrand Russell

“The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.”

— Bertrand Russell

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.”

— Bertrand Russell

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

— Bertrand Russell

“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