1,551 Quotes by Bertrand Russell

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.

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

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

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

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.

Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

Citizens as conceived by governments are persons who admire the status quo and are prepared to exert themselves for its preservation. Oddly enough, while all governments aim at producing men of this type to the exclusion of all other types, their heroes in the past are of exactly the sort that they aim at preventing in the present. Americans admire George Washington and Jefferson, but imprison those who share their political opinions.

Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.