1,551 Quotes by Bertrand Russell

Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.

The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.

There seems scarcely any limit to what could be done in the way of producing a good world, if only men would use science wisely.

Only six need be attempted.

Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell

All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular persons to survive.

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

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.

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.