Quotes from Bertrand Russell

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

I have come to realize that an early symptom of approaching mental illness is the belief that one's work is terribly important. If you consider your work very important you should take a day off.

The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

Modern life cannot be constructed on . . . physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles.

Love, children, and work, are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.

Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality.

Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

The axiomatic method has many advantages over honest work.

Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.

One's work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days.

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.

The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading

Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.

The essence of education is that it is a change effected in the organism to satisfy the operator.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry.

I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.

Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture.

All human activity is prompted by desire.