3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Boredom is… a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell 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.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell 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.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
3 December 2020 Bertrand Russell 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.
