Bertrand Russell Quotes

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Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.

Bertrand Russell
Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.

Bertrand Russell
Science is the attempt to discover, by means of observation, and reasoning based upon it, first, particular facts about the world, and then laws connecting facts with one another and (in fortunate cases) making it possible to predict future occurrences.

Bertrand Russell
At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor.... I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. After I had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but I had found no difficulty whatsoever. This was the first time it had dawned on me that I might have some intelligence.

Bertrand Russell
Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

Bertrand Russell
We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.

Bertrand Russell
Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.

Bertrand Russell
We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any knowledge of truths.

Bertrand Russell
When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience.

Bertrand Russell
There is more difficulty in stating our principle so as to be applicable when our data are confined to a finite part of the universe. Things from outside may always crash in and have unexpected effects.

Bertrand Russell
A fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible.

Bertrand Russell
Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man

Bertrand Russell
A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance.

Bertrand Russell
The aim of physics, consciously or unconsciously, has always been to discover what we may call the causal skeleton of the world.

Bertrand Russell
It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.

Bertrand Russell
Science has always prided itself on being empirical and believing only what could be verified.

Bertrand Russell
As soon as it is held that any belief, no matter what, is important for some other reason than that it is true, a whole host of evils is ready to spring up.

Bertrand Russell
I used often to go to America during Prohibition, and there was far more drunkenness there then than before; the prohibition of pornography has much the same effect.

Bertrand Russell