Bertrand Russell Quotes

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

[One] must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.

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.

Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.