Quotes from Bertrand Russell

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of frendship or affection.

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

The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognise that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater.

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 that hostile.

The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about others things.

These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion.

This is patently absurd but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos.

We may define a Puritan as a man who holds that certain kinds of acts, even if they have no visible bad effects upon others than the agent, are inherently sinful, and, being sinful, ought to be prevented by whatever means is most effectual - the criminal law if possible, and, if not that, then public opinion backed by economic pressure.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.

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

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

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

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

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.

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

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.