Bertrand Russell Quotes - Page 38

• Only six need be attempted.

  Bertrand Russell

  Six, Needs, Humour

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• The essence of education is that it is a change effected in the organism to satisfy the operator.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Philosophy, Essence

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• Any philosophy worth taking seriously would have to be built upon a firm foundation of unyielding despair.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Despair, Foundation

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• If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just be the world as God.

  Bertrand Russell

  Religion, World, May

  Bertrand Russell, John Greer Slater, Peter Köllner (1996). “A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42”, p.183, Psychology Press

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• It would have been very much better for the world if Britain had remained neutral and the Germans had won a quick victory. We should not have had either the Nazis or the Communists if that had happened.

  Bertrand Russell

  War, Victory, World

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• It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

  Bertrand Russell

  Fate, Form, Idealism

  Marriage and Morals ch. 7 (1929)

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• The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.

  Bertrand Russell

  Honesty, Pain, Integrity

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• Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

  Bertrand Russell

  Birthday, Age, Dams

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Unpopular Essays”, p.62, Routledge

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• A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but, by making their own vital impulses fit in with other peoples. This is feasible. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had enough to eat and drink. I feel I shall find the truth on my deathbed and be surrounded by people too stupid to understand—fussing about medicines instead of searching for wisdom. I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.

  Bertrand Russell

  Hate, Philosophy, Stupid

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• Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.

  Bertrand Russell

  Iron, Discipline, Creative

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.12, Psychology Press

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• Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.

  Bertrand Russell

  Machines, Way, Instinct

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.69, Psychology Press

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• Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create.

  Bertrand Russell

  Stars, Real, Law

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.70, Psychology Press

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• There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Thinking, People

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.540, Routledge

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• To speak seriously: the standards of "goodness" which are generally recognized by public opinion are not those which are calculated to make the world a happier place. This is due to a variety of causes, of which the chief is tradition, and the next most powerful is the unjust power of dominant classes.

  Bertrand Russell

  Powerful, Class, World

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.97, Psychology Press

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• Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.

  Bertrand Russell

  Heart, Thinking, Sky

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• Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Water, Tiny

  Bertrand Russell (2008). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.

  Bertrand Russell

  Attitude, Believe, Mind

  Bertrand Russell (2016). “Why I Am Not a Christian”, p.55, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The Church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to pride of intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma.

  Bertrand Russell

  Christian, Pride, Church

  Bertrand Russell (1957). “Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, p.45, Simon and Schuster

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• One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh - a process taking (say) 500 years.

  Bertrand Russell

  War, Thinking, Years

  Letter to Gamel Brenan (September 1, 1945), "The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell" edited by Nicholas Griffin, (p. 410), 2002.

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• The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

  Bertrand Russell

  Two, Justice, Progress

  "Marriage and Morals". Book by Bertrand Russell, Ch. 20, p. 301, en.wikiquote.org. Marriage and Morals.

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• The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts 'sins' and others 'virtue' on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.

  Bertrand Russell

  Christian, Class, Labels

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “Education and the Social Order”, p.73, Routledge

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• I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Thinking, Wish

  Bertrand Russell (1995). “My Philosophical Development”, p.23, Psychology Press

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• Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

  Bertrand Russell

  Progress, Moral, Protest

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Authority and the Individual”, p.30, Routledge

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• Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

  Bertrand Russell

  Imagination, Effort, Desire

  Bertrand Russell (2016). “Political Ideals”, p.16, Bertrand Russell

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• In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Profound, Joy

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.133, Lulu Press, Inc

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