Bertrand Russell Quotes

"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."

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones"

"Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires"

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

"No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value."

"No great achievement is possible without persistent work."

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

"Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents"

"I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."

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

"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

"The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them."

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

"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards."

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

"Herd pressure is to be judged by two things : first, its intensity, and second, its direction"

"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."