Bertrand Russell quotes - page 6

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion. (Bertrand Russell)
I found, one day in school, a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babiesthat's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. View quote
Bertrand Russell
It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws. View quote
Bertrand Russell
There's a Bible on the shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire-poison and antidote. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be. View quote
Bertrand Russell
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action. View quote
Bertrand Russell
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. View quote
Bertrand Russell
An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet. (Bertrand Russell)
One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. View quote
Bertrand Russell
This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. View quote
Bertrand Russell
A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past. View quote
Bertrand Russell
All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive. View quote
Bertrand Russell
It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements; they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The question of "unreality"is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important. View quote
Bertrand Russell
I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race-I am ashamed to belong to such a species. View quote
Bertrand Russell
When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest. (Bertrand Russell)
People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. View quote
Bertrand Russell
To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. View quote
Bertrand Russell