I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along. – Bertrand Russell
To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy. – Bertrand Russell
Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age. – Bertrand Russell
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
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. – Bertrand Russell
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. – Bertrand Russell
Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy. – Bertrand Russell
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
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. – Bertrand Russell
No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? – Bertrand Russell
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
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic. – Bertrand Russell
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all. – Bertrand Russell
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. – Bertrand Russell
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires. – Bertrand Russell
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. – Bertrand Russell
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
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. – Bertrand Russell
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. – Bertrand Russell
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
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. – Bertrand Russell
A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it. – Bertrand Russell
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. – Bertrand Russell
