Quotes from Bertrand Russell

what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise.

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.

It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.

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.

If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?

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

Three passions, simple but overwhelming, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

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

Those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

No man treats a motor car as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin, he does not say, "You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go." He attempts to find out what is wrong and set it right.

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

The total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

Not... what opinions are held, but... how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, [liberal] opinions are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.

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.

In America everybody is of 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.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress -- though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.