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
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
– Bertrand Russell
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
– Bertrand Russell
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
– Bertrand Russell
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.
– 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
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
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.
– Bertrand Russell
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
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
– Bertrand Russell
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
– Bertrand Russell
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.
– Bertrand Russell
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
– 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
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
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
– Bertrand Russell
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.
– Bertrand Russell
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
– 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
Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
– Bertrand Russell
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
– 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 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.
– 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
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.