Quotes from Bertrand Russell

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.

War doesn't determine who's right, it determines who's left

When two great powers disagree about anything - it doesn't matter what - they must find a way to settle it somehow by arbitration or by negotiation, not by war or threat of war.

Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.

It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

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 than hostile.

There was never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle.

We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and the other which we practice but seldom preach.

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

Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.

It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

Real life is, to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

The habit of looking into the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.

Simpson succeeded in proving that there was no harm in giving anaesthetics to men, because God put Adam into a deep sleep when He extracted his rib. But male ecclesiastics remained unconvinced as regards the sufferings of women, at any rate in childbirth.

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering a position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.