Quotes from Bertrand Russell

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.

Every increase in knowledge requires an increase in wisdom

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.

It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, 'progress' would become mechanical and trivial.

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

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

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

...we arrive at the mathematical laws of the physical world. Physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.