Bertrand Russell Quotes

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

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.

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there are no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name, and you must know that it is the name of that particular.

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. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anythmg he finds m himself, and because all his thoughts are of thmgs which they devour.

The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.