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Bertrand Russell
484 quotes
“I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Compare: "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision." B. Russell, New Hopes for a Changin…
“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Greek Exercises (1888), written two days after his sixteenth birthday.
“I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1893); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884–1914), edited by Nicholas Griffin
“Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1894 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.
“Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child – this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884–1914), edited by Nicholas Griffin. It should be noted that in his talk of "the race", he is …
“It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
“What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lucy Martin Donnely, July 6, 1902
“Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902
“Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Gilbert Murray, December 28, 1902
“The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, p. 5
“I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. II: Symbolic Logic, p. 11
“What does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the non-existent.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 450
“Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Principles of Mathematics (1903), p. 451
“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 (1872–1970) first seen 1903 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Gilbert Murray, March 21, 1903
“A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1901 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Denoting", Mind, Vol. 14, No. 56 (October 1905), pp. 479–493; as reprinted in Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1950, (1956)
“All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lucy Donnely, April 22, 1906
“We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1907 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics" (1907), in Essays in Analysis (1973), pp. 273–274
“Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal, Vol. 209 (1909), p. 387
“In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To those who inquire as to the purpose of mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making of machines, the travelling from place to place, and the victory over foreign nations, whether in war or commerce. ... The reasoning faculty itself is generally conceived, by those who urge its cultivation, as merely a means for the avoidance of pitfalls and a help in the discovery of rules for the guidance of practical life.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1872–1970) first seen 1318 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March, 1912, as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 1318
“Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174
“The above proposition is occasionally useful.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comment after the proof that 1+1=2, completed in Principia Mathematica, Volume II, 1st edition (1912), page 86
“When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Theory of Knowledge (1913)
“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 (1872–1970) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism (1914)
“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. It is to be feared, however, that if the word is avoided the confusions of thought with which it has been associated may persist.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism (1914)
“Essentially, this war...is a great race-conflict, a conflict of Teuton and Slav, in which certain other nations, England, France and Belgium, have been led into cooperation with the Slav. ... The conflict of Germany and Russia has been produced not by this or that diplomatic incident, but by primitive passions expressing themselves in the temper of the two races.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1872 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373 and Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (1996), p. 152
“The Austrians are a highly civilised race, half-surrounded by Slavs in a relatively backward state of culture. ... Servia, a country so barbaric that a man can secure the throne by instigating the assassination of his predecessor, is engaged constantly in fermenting the racial discontent of men of the same race who are Austrian subjects.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1872 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373 and Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (1996), p. 152
“It must not be supposed that this conflict is, on the part of the Teuton, aggressive in substance, whatever it may be in form. In substance it is defensive, the attempt to preserve Central Europe for a type of civilisation indubitably higher and of more value to mankind than that of any Slav State. The existence of the Russian menace on the Eastern border is, quite legitimately, a nightmare to Germany.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1872 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: War: The Offspring of Fear (1914), quoted in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996), p. 373
“Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 27
“No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 70
“Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 192
“It seems clear to me that marriage ought to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to be ignored by the law and treated as indifferent by public opinion. It is only through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Ottoline Morrell, January 30, 1916
“I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Lucy Martin Donnelly, February 10, 1916
“I don't like the spirit of socialism – I think freedom is the basis of everything.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Constance Malleson (Colette), September 29, 1916
“[One] must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Colette O'Niel, October 23, 1916; published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, p. 87
“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 (1872–1970) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Colette, December 28, 1916
“How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A characteristic saying of Russell, reported by Aldous Huxley in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 8 October 1917, as quoted in Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 2013)
“The principal source of the harm done by the State is the fact that power is its chief end.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Principles of Social Reconstruction (1917), Ch. II: The State
“In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded. They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dreams and Facts (1919)