Quotes About Russell

After five years spent in retirement, he died of a chill caught while experimenting on refrigeration by stuffing a chicken full of snow. Bacon

His most important books are his two Logics, and these must be understood if the reasons for his views on other subjects are to be rightly apprehended.

it is flattering to suppose that the universe is controlled by a Being who shares our taste and prejudices.

This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

But history is perhaps an even better antidote to anarchic individualism as well as to a lifeless traditionalism

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.

He had a great intellectual influence upon my generation, though in retrospect I do not think it was a very good one.

If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians.

I will not say that the average forethought of a community is inversely proportional to the rate of interest, though this is a view that might be upheld.

The above proposition is occasionally useful.

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.

Obloquy is, to most men, more painful than death; that is one reason why, in times of collective excitement, so few men venture to dissent from the prevailing opinion.

I think that these 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

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.

It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.

Truth only needs to be for once spoken out; and there's such music in her, such strange rhythm, as makes men's memories her joyous slaves.

Integrity safeguards love, and love makes family life rich and zestful-now and forever.

Verona has long haunted the English imagination.

The bad-boy label is just an assumption.

We clacked skeletons -- to call it an embrace would misrepresent the violence of our first collision.

Russell's point is not to assert his right to be left alone to his personal delusions, but that devising a theory that cannot be proved or disproved by observation is pointless in the sense that it teaches you nothing, irrespective of how passionately you may believe in it. You can invent any object or idea you like, but if there is no way of observing it or its consequences, you haven't made a contribution to the scientific understanding of the universe.

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.