Bertrand Russell

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

Answering questions is a major part of sex education. Two rules cover the ground. First, always give a truthful answer to a question; secondly, regard sex knowledge as exactly like any other knowledge.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Affection cannot be created; it can only be liberated.

Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly but will not have the courage to say or even to think that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.

The good life as I conceive it is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.

Dogma demands authority rather than intelligent thought as the source of opinion it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more elevated and spiritual moralists are concerned.

An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

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?

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.

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

No one gossips about other peoples secret virtues.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

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.

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

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.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

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.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important.

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.

When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe, but look only and surely at what are the facts.

A widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Most people would sooner die than start to think. In fact - they do so.

The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

Organizing your leisure effectively is the highest level of civilization.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness it is a sign of emotional failure.

When one admits that nothing is certain one must I think also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

Its easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Italy and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

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.

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.

To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood.

Calculus required continuity and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Keeping an open mind is a virtue but not so open that your brains fall out.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them

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.

No great achievement is possible without persistent work.

What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learned as a task but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

The desire for excitement is very deep seated in human beings

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach.

Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly certain than others.

We know too much and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

In the ordinary business of life punctuality is . . . necessary.

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.

The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

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.

All movements go too far.

To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one particularly if he plays golf.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.