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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) British mathematician , philosopher and logician
Sourced
- I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
- Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. vi.
- I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.
- Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith, who became his first wife (1893); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914), edited by Nicholas Griffin.
- Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don’t know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.
- Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894) Alys was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee", in this and other letters to Alys.
- Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child—this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.
- Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914), edited by Nicholas Griffin. It should be noted that in his talk of "the race", he is referring to "the human race". Alys married Bertrand in December 1894, they divorced in 1921.
- I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.
- An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
- Man is a rational animal - so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.
- An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
- The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
- Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them.
- A History of Western Philosophy
- Rousseau was mad but influential; Hume was sane but had no followers.
- A History of Western Philosophy
- Since the world is what it is, it is clear that valid reasoning from sound principles cannot lead to error; but a principle may be so nearly true as to deserve theoretical respect, and yet may lead to practical consequences which we feel to be absurd. There is therefore a justification for common sense in philosophy, but only as showing that our theoretical principles cannot be quite correct so long as their consequences are condemned by an appeal to common sense which we feel to be irresistible. The theorist may retort that common sense is no more infallible than logic. But this retort, though made by Berkeley and Hume, would have been wholly foreign to Locke's intellectual temper.
- A History of Western Philosophy
- After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
- In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are evidence of bias.
- The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts. Life is not to be conceived on the analogy of a melodrama in which the hero and heroine go through incredible misfortunes for which they are compensated by a happy ending. I live and have my day, my son succeeds me and has his day, his son in turn succeeds him. What is there in all this to make a tragedy about?
- The Conquest of Happiness
- In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire . . . as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself . . . . I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects.
- The Conquest of Happiness
- To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
- The true function of logic,...as applied to matters of experience,...is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.
- The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution which idealism palms off as the totality of being.
- Our Knowledge of the External World
- In fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
- Our Knowledge of the External World
- First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.
- 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.
- Thus [pure] mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
- Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.
- Power: A New Social Analysis
- No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
- Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.
- The Place of Sex Among Human Values
- So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.
- The Place of Sex Among Human Values
- To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
- The Prospects of Industrial Civilization
- There is a story of a man who got the experience from laughing gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."
- A History of Western Philosophy
Attributed
- Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
- Even in civilized humanity one can perceive faint traces of a monogamous instinct.
- I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.
- If a religion is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.
- If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? [1]
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it to be true.
- Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
- Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
- One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
- Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
- Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.
- Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
- The advantages to postulates and theft are great; they are the same.
- The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
- The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
- Variants: Just because an idea is held by the masses does not make it true. Indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, an idea that is widely held is more likely to be false than true.
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.
- The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.
- There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
- To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
- What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know.
- The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
External links
Online writings
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