Quotes by Bertrand Russell

"Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one."

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."

"Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure."

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."

"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

"The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."

"Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery."

"The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."

"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."

"The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts."

"Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance."

"Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give."

"The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history."

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."

"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."

"It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion."

"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."

"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics."

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards."

"The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry."

"To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it."