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One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.
-Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays [1950], "Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind"
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Belief
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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, Unpopular Essays
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What makes a belief true or false I call a "fact." The particular fact that makes a given belief true or false I call its "objective," and the relation of the belief to its objective I call the "reference" or the "objective reference" of the belief. Thus, if I believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, the "objective" of my belief is Columbus's actual voyage, and the "reference" of my belief is the relation between my belief and the voyage--that relation, namely, in virtue of which the voyage makes my belief true (or, in another case, false). "Reference" of beliefs differs from "meaning" of words in various ways, but especially in the fact that it is of two kinds, "true" reference and "false" reference. The truth or falsehood of a belief does not depend upon anything intrinsic to the belief, but upon the nature of its relation to its objective. The intrinsic nature of belief can be treated without reference to what makes it true or false.
http://www.literaturepage.com/read/russell-analysis-of-mind-165.html
-Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, Lecture XII. Belief
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Crime
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Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
-Bertrand Russell
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Doubt
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
-Bertrand Russell
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Earth
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There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.
-Bertrand Russell
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Education
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It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women. ...It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education.
-Bertrand Russell
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Equality
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In America everybody is of 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, Unpopular Essays, 1950
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Facts
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The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. ... But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.
-Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, Philosophy for Laymen
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Freedom
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One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
-Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930
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God
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The difficulty is old, but none the less real. An omnipotent being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.
-Bertrand Russell
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Happiness
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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
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
-Bertrand Russell
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"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."
-Bertrand Russell
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Knowledge
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"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
-Bertrand Russell
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Life
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What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness. Sometimes a voice of one drowning, and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful, the unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. It is usually the central thing around which their lives are built, and I suppose if they did not live most of their lives in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.
-Bertrand Russell
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Love
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Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me,
and I found myself in quite another region.
Within five minutes I went through
some such reflections as the following:
the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable;
nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity
of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached;
whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful,
or at best useless;
it follows that war is wrong,
that a public school education is abominable,
that the use of force is to be deprecated,
and that in human relations one should penetrate
to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.
http://san.beck.org/GPJ24-Russell,Muste.html
-Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1872-1914, p. 234.
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"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."
-Bertrand Russell
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Mathematics
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"Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform."
-Bertrand Russell
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"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."
-Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 1917
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Morals
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We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one that we preach, but do not practice, and another that we practice, but seldom preach.
-Bertrand Russell
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Opinion
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Do not fear to be excentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
-Bertrand Russell
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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
-Bertrand Russell
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Philosophy
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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
-Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
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Pleasure
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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
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Pornography
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Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.
-Bertrand Russell
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Progress
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Change is one thing, progress is another. "Change" is scientific, "progress" is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
-Bertrand Russell
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Questions
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In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
-Bertrand Russell
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Reading
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There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
-Bertrand Russell
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Rivers
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An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
-Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old, Portraits from memory: and other essays, 1956
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An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
-Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old, Portraits from memory: and other essays, 1956
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Science
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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’s mental history, while the latter, after a fitful flickering existence among the Greeks and Arabs, suddenly sprang into importance in the sixteenth century, and has ever since increasingly moulded both the ideas and institutions among which we live.
-Bertrand Russell, , Religion and Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1935
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Superstition
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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
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Teaching
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An educator should think of a child as a garderner thinks of a plant, as something to be made to grow by having the right soil and the right kind amount of water. If your roses fail to bloom, it does not occur to you to whip them, but you should try to find out what has been amiss in your treatment of them... The important thing is what the children do, and not what they do not do. And what they do, if it is to have value, must be a spontaneous expression of their own vital energy.
-Bertrand Russell, "Life Without Fear : New Hopes for a Changing World"
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Torture
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What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.
-Bertrand Russell
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Travel
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Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off.
-Bertrand Russell
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War
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"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
-Bertrand Russell
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With civilized men..., it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out; the emotion is exactly the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat more serious.
-Bertrand Russell, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1950
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Books by and about Bertrand Russell
