Quotes from Bertrand Russell

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.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... 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, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

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

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never

Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself…. When we compare the (present) human population of the globe with … that of former times, we see that "chemical imperialism" has been … the main end to which human intelligence has been devoted.

It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.

Since evolution became fashionable, the glorification of Man has taken a new form.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.

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

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

All forms of fear produce fatigue.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

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

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.