Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Quotes

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

• Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

• The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

• The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

• It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

• There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

• If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

• This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

• In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

• The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

• What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.

• Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

• The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

• But all who are not lunitics are agreed about certain things: That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than to be a slave. Many people desire these things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

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

• I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them though life against the shafts of impartial evidence.

• When he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it sin and asked God to forgive him.

• Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.

• The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

• The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.