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
knowledge views training
The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
men views lasts
The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.
views evil achievement
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
achievement inevitably leave man prey success taught unless
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.
emptiness grand imagine introvert malady manifold prone solitude spectacle spread turns
We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.
dream america law
America ... where laws and customs alike are based on the dreams of spinsters.
courage mean fighting
But courage in fighting is by no means the only form, nor perhaps even the most important. There is courage in facing poverty, courage in facing derision, courage in facing the hostility of one's own herd. In these, the bravest soldiers are often lamentably deficient. And above all there is the courage to think calmly and rationally in the face of danger, and to control the impulse of panic fear or panic rage.
believe hair people
The whiter my hair becomes, the more ready people are to believe what I say.
determination compassion age
There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.
differences community raw-materials
There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.
names people religion
[There has been] every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
believe responsibility opportunity
My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.
success boredom achievement
Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.
truth mistake party
In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself ... may have had anything but a public motive... The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives... He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.