Quotes from Bertrand Russell

A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.

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

Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need of our civilisation.

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

Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken.

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts - the less you know the hotter you get.

To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom.

The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.

Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.

A marriage is likely to be called happy if neither party ever expected to get much happiness out of it.

Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instinct can be perceived.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

An Honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid ... because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.

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

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in the Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

The disappearance of class distinctions is, however, far from complete. 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. There is on this subject a profound and widespread hypocrisy whenever people talk in general terms.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.