Bertrand Russell

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December 9, 2020

Name: Bertrand Russell
Born: 05/18/1872
Died: 02/02/1970 (97 years old)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British polymath – a philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. Throughout his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he also sometimes suggested that his sceptical nature had led him to feel that he had “never been any of these things, in any profound sense.” Russell was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.

Birth Name: Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Awards: De Morgan Medal, Sylvester Medal, Nobel Prize in Literature, Kalinga Prize, Jerusalem Prize

Alias: Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Birth Place: Trellech, Monmouthshire,, United KingdomNoteTag|Monmouthshire’s Welsh status was ambiguous at this time, and was considered by some to be part of England. See Monmouthshire (historic) (Ambiguity over status).

Death Place: Penrhyndeudraeth, Caernarfonshire, Wales, United Kingdom

Source: Wikipedia

Bertrand Russell quotes :

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Bertrand Russell

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
Bertrand Russell

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

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

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell

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

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Bertrand Russell

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Bertrand Russell

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
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.
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.
Bertrand Russell

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
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.
Bertrand Russell

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
Bertrand Russell

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
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.
Bertrand Russell

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
Bertrand Russell

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
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.
Bertrand Russell

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
Bertrand Russell

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
Bertrand Russell

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Bertrand Russell

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Bertrand Russell

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
Bertrand Russell

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Bertrand Russell

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Bertrand Russell

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Bertrand Russell

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Bertrand Russell

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Bertrand Russell

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
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.
Bertrand Russell

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.
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.
Bertrand Russell

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Bertrand Russell

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
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.
Bertrand Russell

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
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.
Bertrand Russell

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Bertrand Russell

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

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
Bertrand Russell