Quotes from Bertrand Russell

Even if (as I myself believe) almost all Hegel's doctrines are false, he still retains an importance which is not merely historical, as the best representative of a certain kind of philosophy which, in others, is less coherent and less comprehensive.

A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance?

All definite knowledge -- so I should contend -- belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy.

The belief that personality is mysterious and irreducible has no scientific warrant, and is accepted chiefly because it is flattering to our human self esteem.

Hegel's philosophy is very difficult—he is, I should say, the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers. Before entering on any detail, a general characterization may prove helpful.

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

I wish to understand [Plato], but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.

After five years spent in retirement, he died of a chill caught while experimenting on refrigeration by stuffing a chicken full of snow. Bacon

There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate.

His most important books are his two Logics, and these must be understood if the reasons for his views on other subjects are to be rightly apprehended.

When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.

Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of he sort that would look exciting to the utward eye. No great achievement is ossible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement

All the labours of ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinciton in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.

any hypothesis, however absurd, may be useful in science, if it enables a discoverer to conceive things in a new way; but when it has served this purpose by luck, it is likely to become an obstacle to further advance.

To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.

Without being aware that I was following in my father's footsteps, I read, before I went to Cambridge, Mill's Logic and Political Economy, and made elaborate notes in which I practised the art of expressing the gist of each paragraph in a single sentence.

One of the defects of all philosophers since Plato is that their inquiries into ethics proceed on the assumption that they already know the conclusions to be reached.

A word is used correctly when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of correctness. The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

The barbarian invasion put an end, for six centuries, to the civilization of western Europe. It lingered in Ireland until the Danes destroyed it in the ninth century;

Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.

The secular power, on the contrary, was in the hands of kings and barons of Teutonic descent, who endeavoured to preserve what they could of the institutions that they had brought out of the forests of Germany. Absolute power was alien to those institutions, and so was what appeared to these vigorous conquerors as a dull and spiritless legality. The king had to share his power with the feudal aristocracy

Popular Cynicism did not teach abstinence from the good things of this world, but only a certain indifference to them.

In his philosophy, nothing is held to be quite true, and nothing quite false; what can be uttered has only a limited truth, and, since men must talk, we cannot blame them for not speaking the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The best we can do, according to Bradley, is to say things that are "not intellectually corrigible"—further progress is only possible through a synthesis of thought and feeling, which, when achieved, will lead to our saying nothing.

Hegel thought that, if enough was known about a thing to distinguish it from all other things, then all its properties could be inferred by logic. This was a mistake, and from this mistake arose the whole imposing edifice of his system. This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.