Quotes from Bertrand Russell

A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so,it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that gaurds the door,and this dragon is religion

For all serious intellectual progress depends upon a certain kind of independence of outside opinion, which cannot exist where the will of the majority is treated with that kind of religious respect which the orthodox give to the will of God.

Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.

He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

I must, 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... I want to bring back into the world of men some little bit of new wisdom. There is a little wisdom in the world; Heraclitus, Spinoza, and a saying here and there. I want to add to it, even if ever so little.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Happiness is promoted by associations of persons with similar tastes and similar opinions.

It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

The object of education ought not to be to make all men think alike, but to make each think in the way which is the fullest expression of his own.

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

Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.

The meta-physical creed, I shall maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion, as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the inspirer of whatever is best in Man.

The habit of considering a man's religious, moral and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution.

Good and bad, and even the higher good that mysticism finds everywhere, are the reflections of our own emotions on other things, not part of the substance of things as they are in themselves.

If children learn of sex as a relation between their parents to which they owe their own existence, they learn of it in its best form and in connection with its biological purpose.

It is not growing fanaticism, but growing democracy, that causes my troubles. Did you ever read the life of Averroes? He was protected by kings, but hated by the mob, which was fanatical. In the end, the mob won. Free thought has always been a perquisite of aristocracy.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

Logic was, formerly, the art of drawing inferences; it has now become the art of abstaining from inferences, since it has appeared that the inferences we feel naturally inclined to make are hardly ever valid.