Quotes from Bertrand Russell

We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.

Religions which have any very strong hold over men's actions have generally some instinctive basis.

Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?

The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.

The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.

There was, I think, never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle.

Man can be scientifically manipulated.

Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.

All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of science.

It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.

No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

Unfortunately, however, power is sweet, and the man who in the beginning seeks power merely in order to have scope for his benevolence is likely, before long, to love the power for its own sake.

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

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

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

Mankind is divided into two classes: those who, being artificial, praise nature, and those who, being natural, praise art.

The commonest objection to birth control is that it is against nature.

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.

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

it [is] possible to suppose that, if Russia is allowed to have peace, an amazing industrial development may take place, making Russia a rival of the United States.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.