Quotes from Bertrand Russell

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

A incerteza, na presença de grandes esperanças e receios, é dolorosa, mas temos de suportá-la, se quisermos viver sem o apoio de confortadores contos de fadas (...). Ensinar a viver sem essa segurança e sem que se fique, não obstante, paralisado pela hesitação, é talvez a coisa principal que a filosofia, em nossa época, pode proporcionar àqueles que a estudam.

The number 0 is the number of terms in a class which has no members, i.e. in the class which is called the null-class.

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

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead ?????? ?? ?????? ???? ?????? ?? ???????? ??????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ?? ??????? ????? ????? ????!

Change is scientific, 'progress' is ethical. Change is indubitable whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

The impulses that lead to the complex desires of adult life can be arranged under a few simple heads. Power, sex, and parenthood appear to me to be the source of most of the things that human beings do, apart from what is necessary for self-preservation.

I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages.

went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

0 is the class whose only member is the null-class.

Modem methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

To begin with the logical objection: 'When we have found a resemblance among several objects,' Hume says, 'we apply the same name to all of them.' Every nominalist would agree. But in fact a common name, such as 'cat,' is just as unreal as the universal CAT is. The nominalist solution of the problem of universals thus fails through being insufficiently drastic in the application of its own principles; it mistakenly applies these principles only to 'things,' and not also to words.

When the rapacity of capitalists grows oppressive, one may be suddenly consoled by the recollection that Brutus, that exemplar of republican virtue, lent money to a city at 40 per cent, and hired a private army to besiege it when it failed to pay the interest.

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

English old ladies still sentimentalize about the wisdom of the East and American intellectuals about the earth consciousness of the negro.

Then, after the Treaty of Versailles had been concluded, they suddenly remembered that they were also producers, and that the influx of German goods which they had been demanding would ruin their industries. They were so puzzled that they started scratching their heads, but that did no good, even when they all did it together and called it an International Conference.

Most of what I learnt at Cambridge had to be painfully unlearnt later; on the whole, what I had learnt for myself from being left alone in an old library had proved more solid.

The first of these rules out the Inquisition; the second rules out such methods as those of British war propaganda, which Hitler praises on the ground that propaganda "must sink its mental elevation deeper in proportion to the numbers of the mass whom it has to grip".

The quarrel between Hume and Rousseau is symbolic: Rousseau was mad but influential; Hume was sane but had no followers.

It remains to define successor. Given any number n, let ? be a class which has n members, and let x be a term which is not a member of ?. Then the class consisting of ? with x added on will have n+1 members.

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life. CHAPTER

The key to our problem lies in mathematical induction. It will be remembered that, in Chapter I., this was the fifth of the five primitive propositions which we laid down about the natural numbers. It stated that any property which belongs to 0, and to the successor of any number which has the property, belongs to all the natural numbers. This was then presented as a principle, but we shall now adopt it as a definition.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible horrible.

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