Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Quotes

• Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

• Obscenity is what happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

• The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.

• Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instincts can be perceived.

• The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century.

• Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

• There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

• 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 that hostile.

• Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

• There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

• The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

• We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

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

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

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

• The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

• The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

• A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

• Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos.

• Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.