Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell -
People
Quotes
77 Sourced Quotes
View all Bertrand Russell Quotes
Source
Report...
People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Human nature being what it is, people will insist upon getting some pleasure out of life.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
The instinctive foundation of the intellectual life is curiosity, which is found among animals in its elementary forms. Intelligence demands an alert curiosity, but it must be of a certain kind. The sort that leads village neighbours to try to peer through curtains after dark has no very high value. The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
I have always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of some other people. It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. We are shocked when we hear stories of the ill-treatment of lunatics, and there are now quite a number of asylums in which they are not ill-treated. Prisoners in Western countries are not supposed to be tortured, and when they are, there is an outcry if the facts are discovered. We do not approve of treating orphans as they are treated in Oliver Twist.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
There are still many people in America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Love is better than hate, because it brings harmony instead of conflict into the desires of the persons concerned. Two people between whom there is love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the success of either is the failure of the other.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
In fact, contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
A life which goes excessively against natural impulse is... likely to involve effects of strain that may be quite as bad as indulgence in forbidden impulses would have been. People who live a life which is unnatural beyond a point are likely to be filled with envy, malice and uncharitableness.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race – I am ashamed to belong to such a species.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Our words tend to conceal what is private and particular in our impressions, and to make us believe that different people live in a common world to a greater extent than is in fact the case.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged...
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
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. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
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.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.
Bertrand Russell
1
2
3
4
Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Bertrand Russell
Creative Commons
Born:
May 18, 1872
Died:
February 2, 1970
(aged 97)
More about Bertrand Russell...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes