Quotes from Bertrand Russell

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it [on Goodreads].

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

I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.

I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.

Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.

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 friendship or affection.

No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.

I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

One must care about a world one will not see.

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.