Quotes from Bertrand Russell

It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of them can be true.

Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty... and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love.

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any knowledge of truths.

In all affairs love religion politics or business it's a healthy idea now and then to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.

What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

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

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know.

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

As for earthquakes, though they were still formidable, they were so interesting that men of science could hardly regret them.

One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.