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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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Machines, Machinery
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Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
-Bertrand Russell
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Marriage
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Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
-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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Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
-Bertrand Russell
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Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
-Bertrand Russell
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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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The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
-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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It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
-Bertrand Russell
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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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Passion
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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.
-Bertrand Russell
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Patriotism
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Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
-Bertrand Russell
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Peace
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This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind.
-Bertrand Russell
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Philosophy
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Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.
-Bertrand Russell
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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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Potential
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Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason ;knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.
-Bertrand Russell
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Power
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The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
-Bertrand Russell
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
-Bertrand Russell
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Professionalism
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.
-Bertrand Russell
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Progress
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A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress -- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known.
-Bertrand Russell
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Books by and about Bertrand Russell