Bertrand Russell
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.Collection: Love
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.Collection: Patriotism
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.Collection: History
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.Collection: Hope
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.Collection: Good
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Religion
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.Collection: Society
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.Collection: Science
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Happiness
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.Collection: Art
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Women
Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Freedom
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.Collection: Good
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.Collection: Fear
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.Collection: Inspirational
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.Collection: Love
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.Collection: Fear
Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.Collection: Age
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.Collection: Dad
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.Collection: Happiness
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.Collection: Happiness
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.Collection: Time
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Death
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Work
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.Collection: Science
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.Collection: Knowledge
Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.Collection: Respect
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Love
Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Experience
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Equality
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.Collection: Men
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.Collection: Hope
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.Collection: War
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.Collection: Women
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.Collection: Respect