1,551 Quotes by Bertrand Russell

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.

All that passes for knowledge can be arranged in a hierarchy of degrees of certainty, with arithmetic and the facts of perception at the top.

You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning

Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale

Televison allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone.

There have been poverty, pestilence, and famine, which were due to man's inadequate mastery of nature. There have been wars, oppressions and tortures which have been due to men's hostility to their fellow men.

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.