Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Quotes

• Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

• The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

• Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.

• To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.

• Those who fear life are already three parts dead.

• What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. 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.

• It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

• The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you get.

• 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.

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

• Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

• A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

• Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

• Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

• Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

• Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

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

• The puritanism of Christianity has played havoc with the moderation that an enlightened and tolerant critical spirit would have produced. I've noticed that in whatever country, county, town, or other region there is a regulation enjoining temperance, the population seems to be entirely composed of teetotallers and drunkards. There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

• It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

• So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.