3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell 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.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
