Last Updated on 24 June 2024

Quotes from Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

• 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.
• All history shows that, as might be expected, minorities cannot be trusted to care for the interests of majorities.
• The break-up of the family, if it comes about, will not be, to my mind, a matter for rejoicing.
• Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
• Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.
• For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy. But if philosophy is to serve a positive purpose, it must not teach mere skepticism, for while dogmatism is harmful, skepticism is useless.
• The human race is a strange mixture of the divine and the diabolic, both equally real, making both good and evil inevitable. Complete despair is no more rational than blind optimism.
• I have always ardently desired to find some justification for the emotions inspired by certain things that seemed to stand outside human life and to deserve feelings of awe. I am thinking in part of very obvious things, such as the starry heavens and a stormy sea on a rocky coast; in part of the vastness of the scientific universe, both in space and time, as compared to the life of mankind; in part of the edifice of impersonal truth, especially truth which, like that of mathematics, does not merely describe the world that happens to exist.
• I have never been able to believe whole-heartedly in any simple nostrum by which all ills are to be cured. On the contrary, I have come to think that one of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence. Nationalism, Fascism, Communism, and now anti-Communism have all produced their crop of bigoted zealots ready to work untold horror in the interest of some narrow creed. All such fanaticisms have in a greater or less degree the defect which I found in the Moscow Marxists, namely, that their dynamic power is largely due to hate.
• I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the God in Abrahamic religions any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.
• If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
• If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless. But we now know, thanks to psychologists and physiologists, that what passes for ‘human nature’ is at most one-tenth nature, the other nine-tenths being nurture. What is called human nature can be almost completely changed by changes in early education.
• If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.
• If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect.
• It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.
• It is not enough to recognize that all our knowledge is, in a greater or less degree, uncertain and vague; it is necessary, at the same time, to learn to act upon the best hypothesis without dogmatically believing it…. [And] when you act upon a hypothesis which you know to be uncertain, your action should be such as will not have very harmful results if your hypothesis is false.
• Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
• Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
• Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
• No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, ‘You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.’ He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right.
• Probability is amongst the most important science, not least because no one understands it.
• The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with the philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know, and hate to be in error.
• Religion is based primarily upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly as the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.
• There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.
• To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
• To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
• We owe to Christianity a certain respect for the individual.
• What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
• When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.
• Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.