Quotes from Bertrand Russell

When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon as all the data are available give the matter your best thought and make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. A

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization .

My first book of stories was 'Satan in the Suburbs'. The title story was in part suggested to me by a stranger whom I met in Mortlake and who, when he saw me, crossed the road and made the sign of the Cross as he went.

Nadie debería creerse perfecto, ni preocuparse demasiado por el hecho de no serlo.

God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures, Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her!

We are uttering a mere tautology if we mean by 'in the mind' the same as by 'before the mind', i.e. if we mean merely being apprehended by the mind.

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

The idealizing of the victim is useful for a time: if virtue is the greatest of goods, and if subjection makes people virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their virtue.

Education in cruelty and fear is bad, but no other kind can be given by those who are themselves the slaves of these passions.

La convicción de que es importante creer esto o aquello, incluso aunque un examen objetivo no apoye la creencia, es común a casi todas las religiones e inspira todos los sistemas de educación estatal. La consecuencia es que las mentes de los jóvenes no se desarrollan y se llenan de hostilidad fanática hacia los que detentan otros fanatismos y, aún con más virulencia, hacia los contrarios a todos los fanatismos.

When an individual partakes of an idea, the individual and the idea are similar; therefore there will have to be another idea, embracing both the particulars and the original idea. And there will have to be yet another, embracing the particulars and the two ideas... ad infinitum. Thus every idea, instead of being one, becomes an infinite series of ideas.

I was not born happy. As a child, my favourite hymn was :'Weary of earth and laden with my sin.' At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unedurable. In adolescense, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

Children were idealized by Wordsworth and un-idealized by Freud. Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come.

La vida buena está inspirada por el amor y guiada por el conocimiento. El conocimiento y el amor son siempre susceptibles de ampliación; por lo tanto, por buena que sea una vida, se puede imaginar una vida mejor. Ni el conocimiento sin amor, ni el amor sin conocimiento, pueden producir una buena vida.

If men were rational, they would take a more correct view of their own interest than they do at present; and if all men acted from enlightened self-interest the world would be a paradise in comparison with what it is. I do not maintain that there is nothing better than self-interest as a motive to action; but I do maintain that self-interest, like altruism, is better when it is enlightened than when it is unenlightened.

I wish to propose a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

The primary motive of sexual ethics as they have existed in Western civilisation since pre-Christian times has been to secure that degree of female virtue without which the patriarchal family becomes impossible, since paternity is uncertain.

The less rational a man is, the oftener he will fail to perceive how what injures others also injures him, because hatred or envy will blind him. Therefore, although I do not pretend that enlightened self-interest is the highest morality, I do maintain that, if it became common, it would make the world an immeasurably better place than it is.

Il mondo non ha bisogno di dogmi, ha bisogno di libera ricerca.

it was above all to Plutarch that they turned. He influenced profoundly the English and French liberals of the eighteenth century, and the founders of the United States; he influenced the romantic movement in Germany, and has continued, mainly by indirect channels, to influence German thought down to the present day.

To preach an altruistic morality appears to me somewhat useless, because it will appeal only to those who already have altruistic desires. But to preach rationality is somewhat different, since rationality helps us to realize our own desires on the whole, whatever they may be.

Kant holds that the mind orders the raw material of sensation, but never thinks it necessary to say why it orders it as it does and not otherwise.

And where a solution appears possible, the new logic provides a method which enables us to obtain results that do not merely embody personal idiosyncrasies, but must command the assent of all who are competent to form an opinion.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.