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Diets and Dieting
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There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
-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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Duty
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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
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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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Ego
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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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Emotions
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We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.
-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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Ethics
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Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
-Bertrand Russell
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Evolution
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Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
-Bertrand Russell
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An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.
-Bertrand Russell
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Experience
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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
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Facts
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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
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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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Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
-Bertrand Russell
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Farming
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With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.
-Bertrand Russell
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Father
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The fundamental defect with fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
-Bertrand Russell
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Fools, Foolishness
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Folly is perennial, yet the human race has survived.
-Bertrand Russell
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If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
-Bertrand Russell
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Freedom
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Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
-Bertrand Russell
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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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Gossip
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No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
-Bertrand Russell
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Government
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There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.
-Bertrand Russell
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Happiness
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To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.
-Bertrand Russell
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Books by and about Bertrand Russell