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Bertrand Russell Quotes
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Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he also confessed that his sceptical nature had led him to feel that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense." Russell was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.In the early 20th century, Russell led the British "revolt against idealism". He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics, the quintessential work of classical logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.

Russell was a prominent anti-war activist and he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would "welcome with enthusiasm" world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Later, Russell concluded that war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was a necessary "lesser of two evils" and criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". Wikipedia  

✵ 18. May 1872 – 2. February 1970  •  Other names Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell: 562 quotes605 likes

Bertrand Russell Quotes

“It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions.”

Bertrand Russell

1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)

“Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage… It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174
1910s

“The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness

“[One] must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Colette O'Niel, October 23, 1916; published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, p. 87
1910s

“I am writing to you to tell you of my decision to return to your Government the Carl von Ossietzsky medal for peace. I do so reluctantly and after two years of private approaches on behalf of Heinz Brandt, whose continued imprisonment is a barrier to coexistence, relaxation of tension and understanding between East and West… I regret not to have heard from you on this subject. I hope that you will yet find it possible to release Brandt through an amnesty which would be a boon to the cause of peace and to your country.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Walter Ulbricht, January 7, 1964. Russell would later write, in his autobiography: "The abduction and imprisonment by the East Germans of Brandt, who had survived Hitler's concentration camps, seemed to me so inhuman that I was obliged to return to the East German Government the Carl von Ossietzky medal which it had awarded me. I was impressed by the speed with which Brandt was soon released".
1960s

“Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)

“If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."”

Bertrand Russell

The argument is really no better than that.
"The First-cause Argument"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

“In the name of national security, the Commission’s hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy?”

Bertrand Russell

&quot;16 Questions on the Assassination&quot; http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/The_critics/Russell/Sixteen_questions_Russell.html in The Minority of One, ed. M.S. Arnoni (1964-09-06), pp. 6-8 <br class="br">1960s

“I quite understand the principle of confining employment as far as possible to the British without regard for efficiency. I think, however, that the Ministry is not applying the principle sufficiently widely. I know many Englishmen who have married foreigners, and many English potential wives who are out of a job. Would not a year be long enough to train an English wife to replace the existing foreign one in such cases?”

Bertrand Russell

Enclosed reply to the Ministry of Labour, in defense of A. S. Neill (who declined to send it), 27 January, 1931
1930s

“It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements; they are only less important… because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves…”

Bertrand Russell

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s

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

Bertrand Russell

1920s, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (1923)

“As geological time goes, it is but a moment since the human race began and only the twinkling of an eye since the arts of civilization were first invented. In spite of some alarmists, it is hardly likely that our species will completely exterminate itself. And so long as man continues to exist, we may be pretty sure that, whatever he may suffer for a time, and whatever brightness may be eclipsed, he will emerge sooner or later, perhaps strengthened and reinvigorated by a period of mental sleep. The universe is vast and men are but tiny specks on an insignificant planet. But the more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.”

Bertrand Russell

"If We are to Survive this Dark Time", The New York Times Magazine (3 September 1950)
1950s

“It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1900s

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

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic

“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March, 1912, as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 1318
1910s

“For want of the apparatus of propositional functions, many logicians have been driven to the conclusion that there are unreal objects. It is argued, e. g., by Meinong, that we can speak about "the golden mountain," "the round square," and so on; we can make true propositions of which these are the subjects; hence they must have some kind of logical being, since otherwise the propositions in which they occur would be meaningless. In such theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Ch. 16: Descriptions

“The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism.
Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.
We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.”

Bertrand Russell

1950s, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955)

“Children are made to learn bits of Shakespeare by heart, with the result that ever after they associate him with pedantic boredom. If they could meet him in the flesh, full of jollity and ale, they would be astonished, and if they had never heard of him before they might be led by his jollity to see what he had written. But if at school they had been inoculated against him, they will never be able to enjoy him. The same sort of thing applies to music lessons. Human beings have certain capacities for spontaneous enjoyment, but moralists and pedants possess themselves of the apparatus of these enjoyments, and having extracted what they consider the poison of pleasure they leave them dreary and dismal and devoid of everything that gives them value. Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him.”

Bertrand Russell

Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 20: The Happy Man, p. 201
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)

“Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 13: Freedom in Society.

“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.”

Bertrand Russell

Authority and the Individual (1949)
1940s

“I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.”

Bertrand Russell

Unarmed Victory (1963), p. 14
1960s

“William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda

“Choose your parents wisely.”

Bertrand Russell

On the recipe for longevity; Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 29 (2012)
1950s

“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

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 6: Machines and the Emotions

“There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.”

Bertrand Russell

Last Essay: "1967"
1960s

“Whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved.”

Bertrand Russell

Introduction, p. 10.
1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918)

“In art [the Chinese] aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.”

Bertrand Russell

The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XI: Chinese and Western Civilization Contrasted
1920s

“In fact, contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 198

“The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Ch. 7: Rational, Real and Complex Numbers

“What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Lucy Martin Donnely, July 6, 1902
1900s

“We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science.”

Bertrand Russell

"The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics" (1907), in Essays in Analysis (1973), pp. 273–274
1900s

“Again, in regard to actual human existence, I have found myself giving honour to those who feel its tragedy, who think truly about Death, who are oppressed by ignoble things even when they are inevitable; yet these qualities appear to me to militate against happiness, not only to the possessors, but to all whom they affect. And, generally, the best life seems to me one which thinks truly and feels greatly about human things, and which, in addition, contemplates the world of beauty and of abstract truths. This last is, perhaps, my most anti-utilitarian opinion: I hold all knowledge that is concerned with things that actually exist – all that is commonly called Science – to be of very slight value compared to the knowledge which, like philosophy and mathematics, is concerned with ideal and eternal objects, and is freed from this miserable world which God has made.
[Utilitarians] have been strangely anxious to prove that the life of the pig is not happier than that of the philosopher – a most dubious proposition…”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1900s

“Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902
1900s

“It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda, books.google.com https://books.google.com/books?id=9tQsg5ITfHsC&amp;pg=PA127&amp;dq=bertrand+russell,+%22diligent+search%22, archive.org https://archive.org/stream/freethoughtoffic00russuoft/freethoughtoffic00russuoft_djvu.txt

“Certain forms of sex which do not lead to children are at present punished by the criminal law: this is purely superstitious, since the matter is one which affects no one except the parties directly concerned… The peculiar importance attached, at present, to adultery is quite irrational… Moral rules ought not to be such as to make instinctive happiness impossible.”

Bertrand Russell

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

“The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet. Vitalism as a philosophy, and evolutionism, show, in this respect, a lack of sense of proportion and logical relevance. They regard the facts of life, which are personally interesting to us, as having a cosmic significance, not a significance confined to the earth's surface. Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same naive humanism; the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance and are best corrected by a little astronomy.”

Bertrand Russell

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

“I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
1930s

“I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty.”

Bertrand Russell

In accepting his Nobel Prize, in December 1950; Russell denied that he had contributed anything in particular to literature. Quoted in LIFE, Editorials: "A great mind is still annoying and adorning our age", 26 May 1952
1950s

“The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Ch. 16: Descriptions

“Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.”

Bertrand Russell

Justice in War-Time (1916), p. 27
1910s

“Your comments on the Cuban crisis are, to me, utterly amazing. You say that the way the solution was arrived at was that 'the Russians discontinued their suicidal policy; and President Kennedy by his resolution and farsightedness saved the world'. This seems to me a complete reversal of the truth. Russia and America had policies leading directly to nuclear war. Khrushchev, when he saw the danger, abandoned his policy. Kennedy did not. It was Khrushchev who allowed the human race to continue, not Kennedy.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Lord Gladwyn, November 14, 1964.There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.
1960s

“I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.”

Bertrand Russell

Fact and Fiction (1961), Part I, Ch. 6: "The Pursuit of Truth", p. 37
1960s

“In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1940s, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Chapter XXXI "The Philosophy of Logical Analysis"

“I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet – a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things…”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), p. 261

“For example, a man who had seen a great many white swans might argue, by our principle, that on the data it was probable that all swans were white, and this might be a perfectly sound argument. The argument is not disproved by the fact that some swans are black, because a thing may very well happen in spite of the fact that some data render it improbable. In the case of the swans, a man might know that colour is a very variable characteristic in many species of animals, and that, therefore, an induction as to colour is peculiarly liable to error. But this knowledge would be a fresh datum, by no means proving that the probability relatively to our previous data had been wrongly estimated. The fact, therefore, that things often fail to fulfill our expectations is no evidence that our expectations will not probably be fulfilled in a given case or a given class of cases. Thus our inductive principle is at any rate not capable of being disproved by an appeal to experience. The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience.”

Bertrand Russell

"On Induction"
1910s, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

“Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult, it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.”

Bertrand Russell

On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 36.No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
1920s

“I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism - both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true. With very few exception, the religions which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.”

Bertrand Russell

Preface (1957)
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

“I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.”

Bertrand Russell

Letter to Gilbert Murray, March 21, 1903
1900s

“The power of the State may be brought to bear, as it often is in England, through public opinion rather than through the laws. By oratory and the influence of the Press, public opinion is largely created by the State, and a tyrannous public opinion is as great an enemy to liberty as tyrannous laws. If the young man who will not fight finds that he is dismissed from his employment, insulted in the streets, cold-shouldered by his friends, and thrown over with scorn by any woman who may formerly have liked him, he will feel the penalty quite as hard to bear as a death sentence. A free community requires not only legal freedom, but a tolerant public opinion, an absence of that instinctive inquisition into our neighbors' affairs which, under the guise of upholding a high moral standard, enables good people to indulge unconsciously a disposition to cruelty and persecution. Thinking ill of others is not in itself a good reason for thinking well of ourselves. But so long as this is not recognized, and so long as the State can manufacture public opinion, except in the rare cases where it is revolutionary, public opinion must be reckoned as a definite part of the power of the State.”

Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Why Men Fight https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Men_Fight (1917), pp. 48-50

“Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.”

Bertrand Russell

1950s, The Impact of Science on Society (1952)