Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRSwas a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense". He was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth18 May 1872
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other.
To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
The teacher, like the artist and the philosopher, can perform his work adequately only if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.
Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.