Quotes from Bertrand Russell

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.

The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

Boys and young men acquire readily the moral sentiments of their social milieu, whatever these sentiments may be.

Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.

Christ . . . said that a man who had looked after a woman lustfully had sinned as much as the man who had seduced her. How absurd!

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

Among the Tibetans, one wife has many husbands, because men are too poor to support a whole wife.

Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye.

Unhappy business men, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.

A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.

The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.

Artists are on the average less happy than men of science.

Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable.

Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.

Thomas Aquinas states parenthetically, as something entirely obvious, that men are more rational than women. For my part, I see no evidence of this.

No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.

It was the duty of wives to submit to husbands, not of husbands to submit to wives. . . men have stronger muscles than women.