Bertrand Russell Quotes

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

"No great achievement is possible without persistent work."

"Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?"

"The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms"

"Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it"

"The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others."

"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."

"It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living."

"For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience."

"It's 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"

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

"Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free."

"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."

"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power."

"Sin is geographical."

"Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance."

"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."

"What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power."

"Folly is perennial, yet the human race has survived."