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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.

“I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.”

— Bertrand Russell

Happiness

All Quotes by Bertrand Russell

“To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.”

— Bertrand Russell

Age

“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”

— Bertrand Russell

Intelligence

“Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”

— Bertrand Russell

Freedom

“Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.”

— Bertrand Russell

History

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

— Bertrand Russell

Dad

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

— Bertrand Russell

Time

“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

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”

— Bertrand Russell

Education

“The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”

— Bertrand Russell

Power

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Bertrand Russell

Fear

“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

“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.”

— Bertrand Russell

God

“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

“Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.”

— Bertrand Russell

War

“The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.”

— Bertrand Russell

Good

“Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.”

— 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

“Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.”

— Bertrand Russell

Men

“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

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”

— Bertrand Russell

Education