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
Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time.
All human activity is prompted by desire.
An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.
All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.