1,551 Quotes by Bertrand Russell

Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

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

Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do.

I FIND IT SO DIFFICULT NOT TO HATE, WHEN I DO NOT HATE I FEEL WE FEW ARE SO LONELY IN THE WORLD

Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak in a manner that suggests the mystique of the 'common man.'

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.