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
All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular persons to survive.
War grows out of ordinary human nature.
Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.
If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just be the world as God...
The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense
Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth'...Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment.
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
Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.
Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.
My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.
Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.
Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opinion.
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.
None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.