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Bertrand Russell Quotes (1872-1970)
Philosopher, Mathematician
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About Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (May 18, 1872 β February 2, 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. In 1950, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Bertrand Russell quotes.
βI've got a one-dimensional mind.β
βDrunkenness is temporary suicide.β
βThe camera is as subjective as we are.β
βPower may be defined as the production of intended effects.β
βThe above proposition is occasionally useful.β
βRighteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.β
βThe state is primarily an organization for killing foreigners.β
βNo rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.β
βHow much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.β
βReason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.β
Bertrand Russell Quotes by Topic
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Bertrand Russell on Christianity 11 quotes
βSo far as I can remember, there's not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.β
Bertrand Russell on Stoicism 11 quotes
βWhat was best in the Cynic doctrine passed over into Stoicism, which was an altogether more complete and rounded philosophy.β
Bertrand Russell on Love 10 quotes
βThe good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.β
Bertrand Russell on Mathematics 10 quotes
βPi's face was masked, and it was understood that none could behold it and live. But piercing eyes looked out from the mask, inexorable, cold and enigmatic.β
Bertrand Russell on Philosophy 8 quotes
βScience is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.β
Bertrand Russell on Arithmetic 8 quotes
βThe most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion.β
Bertrand Russell on Fear 7 quotes
View all 7 quotes on Fear →Bertrand Russell on Deductive reasoning 6 quotes
βThe Greeks... discovered mathematics and the art of deductive reasoning. Geometry, in particular, is a Greek invention, without which modern science would have been impossible.β
Bertrand Russell on Fact 5 quotes
βFacts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning.β
Bertrand Russell on Nuclear war 5 quotes
βThe human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say the odds are about three to one against survival.β
Bertrand Russell on Knowledge 4 quotes
View all 4 quotes on Knowledge →Bertrand Russell on Life 4 quotes
βThe good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.β
What Bertrand Russell Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Bertrand Russell shared regarding contemporaries.
Bertrand Russell on George Berkeley 9 quotes
βBerkeley, after abolishing matter, is only saved from complete subjectivism by a use of God which most subsequent philosophers have regarded as illegitimate.β
Bertrand Russell on Aristotle 7 quotes
βI do not agree with Plato, but if anything could make me do so, it would be Aristotle's arguments against him.β
Bertrand Russell on Jesus 7 quotes
βIt is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that [Christ was the best and the wisest of men]. I do not myself.β
Bertrand Russell on Baruch Spinoza 7 quotes
βSpinoza (1634-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.β
Bertrand Russell on Ludwig Wittgenstein 7 quotes
βW. is very excitable: he has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs. He has the pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him. His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair β he has just the sort of rage when he can't understand things as I have.β
Bertrand Russell on Gottfried Leibniz 5 quotes
βIn Leibniz, a vast edifice of deduction is pyramided upon a pin-point of logical principle. In Leibniz, if the principle is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid, all is well; but the structure in unstable, and the slightest flaw anywhere brings it down in ruins.β
Bertrand Russell on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 4 quotes
βHegel published his proof that there must be exactly seven planets just a week before the discovery of the eighth. The matter was hushed up, and a new, revised edition was hastily prepared; nevertheless, there were some who scoffed.β
Bertrand Russell on Vladimir Lenin 4 quotes
βWhen I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, "and they soon hanged them from the nearest treeβha! ha! ha!" His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.β
Bertrand Russell on Socrates 4 quotes
βSocrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death, and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts.β
Bertrand Russell on Pythagoras 3 quotes
βPersonal religion is derived from ecstasy, theology from mathematics, and both are to be found in Pythagoras.β
Bertrand Russell on Karl Marx 3 quotes
βMarx'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.β
Bertrand Russell on Friedrich Nietzsche 3 quotes
βSpeaking of Spinoza he [Nietzsche] says: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!" Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. "[Thou goest to woman?] Forget not thy whip"βbut nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.β
Quotes About Bertrand Russell
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Bertrand Russell from others.
A. J. Ayer on Bertrand Russell 2 quotes
βThe popular conception of a philosopher as one who combines universal learning with the direction of human conduct was more nearly satisfied by Bertrand Russell than by any other philosopher of our time.β
Michael J. Beeson on Bertrand Russell
βBertrand Russell found Frege's famous error: Frege had overlooked what is now known as the Russell paradox. Namely, Frege's rules allowed one to define the class of x such that P(x) is true for any "concept" P. Frege's idea was that such a class was an object itself, the class of objects "falling under the concept P." Russell used this principle to define the class R of concepts that do not fall under themselves. This concept leads to a contradiction... argument: (1) if R falls under itself then it does not fall under itself; (2) this contradiction shows that it does not fall under itself; (3) therefore by definition it does fall under itself after all.β
C. D. Broad on Bertrand Russell
βAs we all know, Mr. Russell produces a different system of philosophy every few years...β
Edwin Arthur Burtt on Bertrand Russell
βWhat a contrast between the audacious philosophy of Dante reposeful, contemplative, infinitely confident and this view! To Russell, man is but the chance and temporary product of a blind and purposeless nature, an irrelevant spectator of her doings, almost an alien intruder on her domain.β
Nicholas Capaldi on Bertrand Russell
βBertrand Russell is the key defining figure of analytic philosophy.β
Alistair Cooke on Bertrand Russell
βThe great thing about [Russell] is that he will not give in β to prudence, cynicism or simple horse sense. Sometime, somewhere, he agonizes, the rational man will make a decent world of his instincts. Considered as a type, he is a perennial scold. But considered as Bertrand Russell, he is surely one of the glories of our time... For he is at once a man of unyielding honesty, a first-class intellect and the possessor of one of the master styles of the English language. It is the last of these gifts that guarantees the onlooker an unflagging fascination with his life. For it gives charm to many a frailty, makes the world over every day in the light of his intelligence and his irony, and converts every political crusade, exchange of learned correspondence and lovers' quarrel into an episode as enchanting as a Mozart concerto.β
Will Durant on Bertrand Russell
βThere have been two Bertrand Russells: one who died during the war; and another who rose out of that one's shroud, an almost mystic communist born out of the ashes of a mathematical logician. Perhaps there was a tender mystic strain in him always; represented at first by a mountain of algebraic formulae; and then finding a distorted expression in a socialism that has the earmarks rather of a religion than of a philosophy. The most characteristic title among his books is Mysticism and Logic: a merciless attack on the illogicality of mysticism, followed by such a glorification of scientific method as makes one think of the mysticism of logic. Russell inherits the English positivist tradition, and is resolved to be tough-minded, because he knows that he cannot...It is remarkable that after writing several volumes of this learned moonshine, Bertrand Russell should suddenly come down upon the surface of this planet, and begin to reason very passionately about war, and government, and socialism, and revolution,β and never once make use of the impeccable formulae piled like Pelion upon Ossa in his Principia Mathematica. Nor has anyone else, observably, made use of them...Freedom is the supreme good; for without it personality is impossible. Freedom of thought and speech would go like a cleansing draught through the neuroses and superstitions of the "modern" mind. For we are not so educated as we think; we are but beginning the great experiment of universal schooling; and it has not had time to affect profoundly our ways of thinking and our public life. We are building the equipment, but we are still primitive in methods and technique; we think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind. The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man is the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions; the scientist is slow to believe, and never speaks without modification...There is nothing that man might not do if our splendid organization of schools and universities were properly developed and properly manned, and directed intelligently to the reconstruction of human character. This, and not violent revolution, or paper legislation, is the way out of economic greed and international brutality. Man has come to control all other forms of life because he has taken more time in which to grow up; when he takes still more time, and spends that time more wisely, he may learn even to control arid. remake himself. Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia...All in all, a very lovable man: capable of the profoundest metaphysics and the subtlest mathematics, and yet speaking always simply, with the clarity which comes only to those who are sincere; a man addicted to fields of thought that usually dry up the springs of feeling, and yet warmed and illumined with pity, full of an almost mystic tenderness for mankind. Not a courtier, but surely a scholar and a gentleman, and a better Christian than some who mouth the word. Happily, he is still young and vigorous, the flame of life burns brightly in him yet; who knows but this next decade will see him grow out of disillusionment into wisdom, and write his name among the highest in "the serene brotherhood of philosophs"?β
Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution on Bertrand Russell
βBertrand Russell, as all reading America knows, has a right to be proud of his name in respect of his own achievements. He is, I believe, a very great mathematician. But he is also a profound thinker on human affairs, and unlike so many important thinkers, he can write. His thoughts do not have to be dug up for general consumption out of long, badly constructed books full of highly technical terms. They reach us in small, clearly constructed books, and in English that is not only beautifully simple but often poeticβ¦β
Albert Einstein on Bertrand Russell
βGreat spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.β
Dear Bertrand Russell on Bertrand Russell
βLieber Bertrand Russell! Ich habe schon lange den Wunsch, Ihnen zu schreiben. Nichts anderes wollte ich dabei, als Ihnen meine hohe Bewunderung ausdrΓΌcken. Die Klarheit, Sicherheit und Unparteilichkeit, mit der Sie die logischen, philosophischen und menschlichen Dinge in Ihren BΓΌchern behandelt haben, steht nicht nur in unserer Generation unerreicht da.β
Valerie Eliot on Bertrand Russell
βMy husband, T.S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in, the driver said: 'You're T.S. Eliot.' When asked how he knew, he replied: 'Ah, I've got an eye for a celebrity. Only '''the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: "Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about?" And, do you know, he couldn't tell me.''''β
Joseph Epstein on Bertrand Russell
βWhat is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.β
Disputed Quotes
Quotes attributed to Bertrand Russell that are questionable.
βIf there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.β
βA new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man. It is where this respect is lacking that scientific technique is dangerous.β
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to Bertrand Russell
βIf a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then GΓΆdel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.β
About Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (May 18, 1872 β February 2, 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. In 1950, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.