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Bertrand Russell

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01Undated

Secularists, who dismiss religion as simply false, and fundamentalists, who insist on literal truth, both miss the point. A revolt should be so unthinkable, as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton. Democracy is the even distribution of ultimate political power among all adults except lunatics, criminals and peers. When people think about democracy, they generally couple with it a considerable measure of liberty for individuals and groups. Unemployment, illness, and old age do not deserve punishment. No nation has ever shown more heroism than was shown by the Japanese, but they were defeated by American industrial productivity. The hope that human race will allow itself to survive, is therefore somewhat slender. Men will have to submit to the law, even when they think that the law is unjust and iniquitous. They were historical believes which, after being generally accepted for a long time, have in the end been admitted to be mistaken. All fanatical creeds do harm, they promote hatred and strife. Some people who say to love your neighbor, in fact think is right to hate people who do not do that. The attitude that believing or accepting a belief unquestionably on a basis of authority is contrary to the scientific spirit.

Bertrand Russell / quote

02Undated

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know independently of experiences. Absolute idea can describe the absolute reality. Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do. The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

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03Undated

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

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04Undated

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

Bertrand Russell / quote

05Undated

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

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06Undated

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

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07Undated

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

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08Undated

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

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09Undated

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

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10Undated

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

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11Undated

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

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12Undated

My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

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13Undated

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

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14Undated

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

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15Undated

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

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16Undated

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect

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17Undated

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

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18Undated

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

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19Undated

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.

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20Undated

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

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21Undated

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

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22Undated

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

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23Undated

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Bertrand Russell / quote

24Undated

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.

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