Quotes by Bertrand Russell

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The good life is love guided by reason.
 
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
 
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. 
 
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
 
Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.
 
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
 
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
 
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
 
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
 
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. 
 
A marriage is likely to be called happy if neither party ever expected to get much happiness out of it.
 
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
 
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the Government.
 
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
 
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
 
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
 
The object of education ought not to be to make all men think alike, but to make each think in the way which is the fullest expression of his own.
 
The important fact of the present time is not the struggle between capitalism and socialism but the struggle between industrial civilization and humanity.
 
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
 
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
 
22 quotes     Show as list