Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Bertrand Russell

Biography : British philosopher, logician and mathematician.
Born: 1872 - Died: 1970
Period:
20th century
19th century
Place of birth: United Kingdom

Bertrand Russell - Quotes

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell

society

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
Bertrand Russell

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
Bertrand Russell

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
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

intelligence

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Bertrand Russell - The Conquest of Happiness

happiness

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
Bertrand Russell

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell

knowledge

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

opinion

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
Bertrand Russell

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
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

poetry

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

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
Bertrand Russell

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
Bertrand Russell

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Bertrand Russell

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell ? - Quotation of uncertain origin

time

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
Bertrand Russell

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Bertrand Russell

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
Bertrand Russell

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

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
Bertrand Russell

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Bertrand Russell /

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
Bertrand Russell

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Bertrand Russell

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

ethics

Bertrand Russell - Quotes

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