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
Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.
Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said "thou shalt not," and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code.
Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.
We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one that we preach, but do not practice, and another that we practice, but seldom preach.
For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy
Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.
Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.
Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.
A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.
Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.
I am firm; YOU are obstinate; HE is a pig-headed fool.
The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.
Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.