Bertrand Russell Quotes

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I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language 'understand of the people.'

Bertrand Russell
The white tails of rabbits, according to some theologians, have a purpose, namely to make it easier for sportsmen to shoot them.

Bertrand Russell
It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.

Bertrand Russell
Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. They say to themselves, for example, 'So this is what an earthquake is like,' and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.

Bertrand Russell
The argument against the persecution of opinion does not depend upon what the excuse for persecution may be. The argument is that we none of us know all truth, that the discovery of new truth is promoted by free discussion and rendered very difficult by suppression.

Bertrand Russell
A good man will never suspect his friends of shady actions: this is part of his goodness. A good man will never be suspected by the public of using his goodness to screen villains: this is part of his utility

Bertrand Russell
Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.

Bertrand Russell
The Stoic assures us that what is happening now will happen over and over again. [If so, Providende would] ultimately grow weary through despair.

Bertrand Russell
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately, however, power is sweet, and the man who in the beginning seeks power merely in order to have scope for his benevolence is likely, before long, to love the power for its own sake.

Bertrand Russell
The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the expert consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so.

Bertrand Russell
The really useful education is that which follows the direction of the child's own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.

Bertrand Russell
The frequency with which a man experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasion which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he is accustomed

Bertrand Russell
If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen.

Bertrand Russell
Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.

Bertrand Russell
The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security.

Bertrand Russell
In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

Bertrand Russell
The conception of tensors is possible owing to the circumstance that the transition from one co-ordinate system to another expresses itself as a linear transformation in the differentials. One here uses the exceedingly fruitful mathematical device of making a problem "linear" by reverting to infinitely small quantities.

Bertrand Russell
A million million years gives us some time to prepare for the end... let us make the best of it.

Bertrand Russell
A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

Bertrand Russell
Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.

Bertrand Russell
In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.

Bertrand Russell
Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.

Bertrand Russell
The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.

Bertrand Russell
I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror... As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight.

Bertrand Russell
In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.

Bertrand Russell
It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women....It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education.

Bertrand Russell
How can a certain line, or a certain surface, form an impassable barrier to space, or have any mobility different in kind from that of all other lines or surfaces? The notion cannot, in philosophy, be permitted for a moment, since it destroys that most fundamental of all the axioms, the homogeneity of space.

Bertrand Russell
Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.

Bertrand Russell
The scientific spirit is not an affair of quotation, of externally acquired information, anymore than manners are an affair of the etiquette-book.

Bertrand Russell