Bertrand Russell

I am as drunk as a lord, but then, I am one, so what does it matter ?

— Bertrand Russell

In the ordinary business of life punctuality is . . . necessary.

— Bertrand Russell

Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.

— Bertrand Russell

The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes.

— Bertrand Russell

Artists are on the average less happy than men of science.

— Bertrand Russell

Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.

— Bertrand Russell

John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!

— Bertrand Russell

Insight, untested and unsupported, is an uncertain guarantee of the truth.

— Bertrand Russell

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it…

— Bertrand Russell

All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

— Bertrand Russell

Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.

— Bertrand Russell

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly certain than others

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

“Knowledge exists, and good will exists; but both remain impotent until they possess the proper organs for making themselves heard.”

— Bertrand Russell

Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a…

— Bertrand Russell

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot…

— Bertrand Russell

All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only…

— Bertrand Russell

You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a…

— Bertrand Russell

[Regarding] the convention that clergymen are more virtuous than other men. Any average selection of mankind, set apart and told that it…

— Bertrand Russell

“For all serious intellectual progress depends upon a certain kind of independence of outside opinion, which cannot exist where the will of…

— Bertrand Russell

“To preach an altruistic morality appears to me somewhat useless, because it will appeal only to those who already have altruistic desires.…

— Bertrand Russell

The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome…

— Bertrand Russell

Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless…

— Bertrand Russell

The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based…

— Bertrand Russell

“That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems…

— Bertrand Russell

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was,…

— Bertrand Russell

“Meanwhile the whole machinery of the State, in all the different countries, is turned on to making defenseless children believe absurd propositions…

— Bertrand Russell

“Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such…

— Bertrand Russell

“What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession; reverence for others;…

— Bertrand Russell

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater;…

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

The more you complain the longer God lets you live

— Bertrand Russell

Almost all education has a political motive.

— Bertrand Russell

A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

— Bertrand Russell

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

— Bertrand Russell

Change is one thing, progress is another.

— Bertrand Russell

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

— Bertrand Russell

Folly is perennial, yet the human race has survived.

— Bertrand Russell