B

Bertrand Russell

78 quotes

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and social critic. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 for his varied and significant writing championing humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. Russell is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy.

“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”

— Bertrand Russell

Patriotism

All Quotes by Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

Great

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

— Bertrand Russell

Work

“Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.”

— Bertrand Russell

Age

“Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.”

— Bertrand Russell

Good

“Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.”

— Bertrand Russell

Happiness

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

— Bertrand Russell

Time

“Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.”

— Bertrand Russell

Art

“The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.”

— Bertrand Russell

Great

“There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.”

— Bertrand Russell

Respect

“Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.”

— Bertrand Russell

Power

“The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.”

— Bertrand Russell

Poetry

“In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.”

— Bertrand Russell

Experience

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.”

— Bertrand Russell

Science

“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.”

— Bertrand Russell

Happiness

“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.”

— Bertrand Russell

Respect

“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.”

— Bertrand Russell

Death

“War does not determine who is right - only who is left.”

— Bertrand Russell

War

“Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.”

— Bertrand Russell

Respect

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

— Bertrand Russell

Fear

“The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.”

— Bertrand Russell

Dad