Quotes from Bertrand Russell

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

If politics is to become scientific, and if the event is not to be constantly surprising, it is imperative that our political thinking should penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action

My first advice on how not to grow old would be to choose you ancestors carefully.

There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.

If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.

Ants and savages put strangers to death.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf

Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.

Most human beings, though in varying degrees, desire to control, not only their own lives but also the lives of others

One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.

Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations.

Some people would rather die than think.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.

The problem with the wise is they are so filled with doubts while the dull are so certain.

Faith: a firm belief for which there is no evidence.