Russell, Bertrand.
English logician,
mathematician and philosopher, 1872-1970.
Links:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/
http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/brs.html
http://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~russell/brhome.htm
http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Icarus.html
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/2528/russell.htm#Best%20quotes
Quotations:
1. ”A habit of basing
convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty
which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills
from which the world suffers.”
2. “A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment
based upon it.”
3. “All exact science is
dominated by the idea of approximation.”
4. ”All movements go too
far.”
5. “A process which led
from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress
- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known.”
6. ”Aristotle maintained
that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never
occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.”
7. “Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the
sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.”
8. “Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise
the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”
9.
"Brief and powerless is Man's life;
on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark."
10. ”"But," you
might say, "none of this shakes my belief that 2 and 2 are 4." You are quite right, except in marginal cases -- and it is
only in marginal cases that you are doubtful whether a certain animal is a dog
or a certain length is less than a meter. Two must be two of something, and the
proposition "2 and 2 are 4" is useless unless it can be applied. Two
dogs and two dogs are certainly four dogs, but cases arise in which you are
doubtful whether two of them are dogs. "Well, at any rate there are four
animals," you may say. But there are microorganisms concerning which it is
doubtful whether they are animals or plants. "Well, then living
organisms," you say. But there are things of which it is doubtful whether
they are living organisms or not. You will be driven into saying: "Two
entities and two entities are four entities." When you have told me what
you mean by "entity," we will resume the argument.”
11. “Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is
indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.”
12. “Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from
convention, largely because they regard
such departure as a criticism of themselves.”
13. “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted
was once eccentric.”
14. “Every isolated passion,
is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear
of its non-fulfillment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in form of explicit
and conscious fanaticism, sometimes in paralyzing timidity, sometimes in an
unconscious or subconscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. the
man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own
mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the
others.”
15. “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of
cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
16. “Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But
from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at
large no great good is to be expected.”
17. “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.”
18. ”I found one day in
school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I
hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the
history of the human race.”
19. “If the old morality is to be re-established, certain
things are essential; some of them are already done, but experience shows that
these alone are not effective. The first essential is that the education of
girls should be such as to make them stupid and superstitious and ignorant;
this requisite is already fulfilled in schools over which the churches have any
control. The next requisite is a very severe censorship upon all books giving
information on sex subjects; this condition also is coming to be fulfilled in
England and in America, since the censorship, without change in the law, is
being tightened up by the increasing zeal of the police. These conditions,
however, since they exist already, are clearly insufficient. The only thing
that will suffice is to remove from young women all opportunity of being alone
with men: girls must be forbidden to earn their living by work outside the
home; they must never be allowed an outing unless accompanied by their mother
or an aunt; the regrettable practice of going to dances without a chaperon must
be sternly stamped out. It must be illegal for an unmarried woman under fifty
to possess a motor-car, and perhaps it would be wise to subject all unmarried
women once a month to medical examination by police doctors, and to send to a
penitentiary all such as were found to be not virgins. The use of contraceptives
must, of course, be eradicated, and it must be illegal in conversation with
unmarried women to throw doubt upon the dogma of eternal damnation. These
measures, if carried out vigorously for a hundred years or more, may perhaps do
something to stem the rising tide of immorality. I think, however, that in
order to avoid the risk of certain abuses, it would be necessary that all
policemen and all medical men should be castrated. Perhaps it would be wise to
carry this policy a step further, in view of the inherent depravity of the male
character. I am inclined to think that moralists would be well advised to
advocate that all men should be castrated, with the exception of ministers of
religion since reading Elmer Gantry, I have begun to feel that even this
exception is perhaps not quite wise.”
20. “If we were all given by magic the power to read each
other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all
friendships.”
21. “In all affairs it's a healthy
thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken
for granted.”
22.
“I've always thought
respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning
for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.”
23. “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be
wrong.”
24. “Language serves not
only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist
without it.”
25. “Life is
nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”
26. “Love is something far more than
desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the
loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of
their lives.”
27. “Man can
be scientifically manipulated.”
28. “Man
needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise
and change.”
29. “Mathematics
may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about,
nor whether what we are saying is true.”
30. “Mathematics
. . . possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere,
like that of sculpture.”
31. "Many people would rather die
than think; in fact, most do."
32. “Men are
born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”
33. “Men fear thought as they fear
nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is
subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to
privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into
the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the
light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”
34. “Men have from time immemorial been
allowed in practice, if not in theory, to indulge in illicit sexual relations.
It has not been expected of a man that he should be a virgin on entering
marriage, and even after marriage, infidelities are not viewed very gravely if
they never come to the knowledge of a man's wife and neighbors. The possibility
of this system has depended upon prostitution. This institution, however, is
one which it is difficult for a modern to defend, and few will suggest that
women should acquire the same rights as men through the establishment of a
class of male prostitutes for the satisfaction of women who wish, like their husbands,
to seem virtuous without being so.... Every conventional moralist who takes the
trouble to think it out will see that he is committed in practice to what is
called the double standard, that is to say, the view that sexual virtue is more
essential in a woman than in a man. It is all very well to argue that his
theoretical ethic demands continence of men also. To this there is the obvious
retort that the demand cannot be enforced on the men since it is easy for them
to sin secretly. The conventional moralist is thus committed against his will
not only to an inequality as between men and women, but also to the view that
it is better for a young man to have intercourse with prostitutes than with
girls of his own class, in spite of the fact that with the latter, though not
with the former, his relations are not mercenary and may be affectionate and
altogether delightful. Moralists, of course, do not think out the consequences
of advocating a morality which they know will not be obeyed; they think that so
long as they do not advocate prostitution they are not responsible for the fact
that prostitution is the inevitable outcome of their teaching. This, however,
is only another illustration of the well-known fact that the professional
moralist in our day is a man of less than average intelligence.”
35. “Men who allow their love of power
to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one
man will think that he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will
think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar
delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to
professorships in philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent
language, lead to dictatorships.”
36. ”Men who are unhappy, like men who
sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”
37. “Most men and women, given suitable
conditions, will feel passionate love at some period of their lives. For the
inexperienced, however, it is very difficult to distinguish passionate love
from mere sex hunger; especially is this the case with well-brought-up girls,
who have been taught that they could not possibly like to kiss a man unless
they loved him. If a girl is expected to be a virgin when she marries, it will
very often happen that she is trapped by a transient and trivial sex
attraction, which a woman with sexual experience could easily distinguish from
love. This has undoubtedly been a frequent cause of unhappy marriages. Even
where mutual love exists, it may be poisoned by the belief of one or both that
it is sinful. This belief may, of course, be well founded. Parnell, for example,
undoubtedly sinned in committing adultery, since he thereby postponed the
fulfillment of the hopes of Ireland for many years.”
38. “Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of
power.”
39. ”No man treats a motor
car as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its
annoying behavior to sin, he does not say, "You are a wicked motorcar, and
I shall not give you any more petrol until you go." He attempts to
find out what is wrong and set it right.”
40. ”No one gossips about other
people's secret virtues.”
41. “Obscenity is whatever happens to
shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.”
42. “Of all
forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
43. “One
should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and
to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary
submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”
44. “Order,
unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and
encyclopedias.”
45. ”Ordinary language is totally
unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of
everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical
logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.”
46. “Patriotism
is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”
47. “Prophets,
mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a
vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are
not subject to the dominion of the herd.”
48. “Real
life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the
ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no
practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.”
49. “Religions
that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our
profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.”
50. “Science
is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.”
51. “Sin is geographical.”
52. “Some would sooner die than think.
In fact, they often do.”
53. “The commonest objection to birth
control is that it is against 'nature.' (For some reason we are not allowed to
say that celibacy is against nature; the only reason I can think of is that it
is not new.) Malthus saw only three ways of keeping down the population: moral restraint,
vice, and misery. Moral restraint, he admitted, was not likely to be practiced
on a large scale. 'Vice,' i.e., birth control, he, as a clergyman, viewed with
abhorrence. There remained misery. In his comfortable parsonage, he
contemplated the misery of the great majority of mankind with equanimity, and
pointed out the fallacies of the reformers who hoped to alleviate it.”
54. “The completely untraveled person
will view all foreigners as the savage regards the members of another herd. But
the man who has traveled, or who has studied international politics, will have
discovered that, if he had to prosper, it must, to some degree, become
amalgamated with other herds. If you are English and someone says to you:
"The French are your brothers," your instinctive feeling will be
"Nonsense, they shrug their shoulders, and talk French. And I am even told
that they eat frogs. If he explains to you that one may have to fight the
Russians, that, if so, it will be desirable to defend the line of the Rhine,
and that, if the line of the Rhine is to be defended, the help of the French is
essential, you will begin to see what he means when he says that French are our
brothers. But if some fellow-traveler were to go on and say that the Russians
are also your brothers, he would be unable to persuade you, unless he could
show that we are in danger from the Martians. We love those who hate our
enemies, and if we had no enemies, there would be very few people whom we
should love.”
55. “The criminal law has, from the
point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those
impulses of aggression which cowardice, disguised as morality, restrains in
their more spontaneous forms. War has the same merit. You must not kill you
neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate
can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous
impulses become patriotic heroism.”
56. ”The degree of one's emotion varies
inversely with one's know - ledge of the facts -- the less you know the hotter
you get.”
57. “The desire for excitement is very
deep-seated in human beings, especially in males. I suppose that in the hunting
stage it was more easily gratified than it has been since. The chase was
exciting, war was exciting, courtship was exciting. A savage would manage to
commit adultery with a woman while her husband is asleep beside her. This
situation, I imagine, is not boring. But with the coming of agriculture life
began to grow dull, except, of course, for the aristocrats, who remained, and
still remain, in the hunting stage.”
58. “... The difference between mind
and brain is not a difference of quality, but a difference of arrangement. It
is like the difference between arranging people in geographical order or in
alphabetical order, both of which are done in the post office directory. The
same people are arranged in both cases, but in different contexts. In like
manner, the context of visual sensation for physics is physical, and outside
the brain. Going backwards, it takes you to the eye, and thence to a photon and
thence to a quantum transition in some distant object. The context of visual
sensation for psychology is quite different. Suppose, for example, the visual
sensation is tat of a telegram saying that you are ruined. A number of events
will take place in your mind in accordance with the laws of physical causation,
and it may be quite a long time before there is any purely physical effect,
such as tearing your hair or exclaiming "Woe is me!"”
59. “The frequency with which a man
experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasion
which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he
is accustomed. To an early Victorian man a woman's ankles were sufficient
stimulus, whereas the modern man remains untouched by anything up to the thigh.
This is merely a question of fashion in clothing. If nakedness were the
fashion, it would cease to excite us, and women would be forced, as they are in
certain savage tribes, to adopt clothing as means of making themselves sexually
attractive. Exactly similar considerations apply to the literature and
pictures: what was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker
epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual
appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective. Nine-tents of
thew appeal of pornography is due to indecent feelings which moralists
inculcate in the young; the other tents is psychological, and will occur in one
way of another, whatever the state of the law may be. On these grounds,
although I fear that few will agree with me, I am firmly persuaded that there
ought to be no law whatsoever on the subject of obscene publications.”
60. “The fundamental defect of fathers
is that they want their children to be a credit to them.”
61. “The
good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are
good you will be happy; I mean that if
you are happy you will be good.”
62. "The good life is one inspired
by love and guided by knowledge."
63. “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.”
64. “The point of philosophy is to
start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with
something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
65. “Three
passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing
for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of
mankind.”
66. "There is much pleasure to be
gained in useless knowledge."
67. “The root of the matter is a very
simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to
mention it for fear of the derisive smile with which cynics will greet my
words. The thing I mean -- please forgive me for mentioning it -- is love, or
compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a reason for
courage, a guide in action, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.
If you feel this, you have all that anybody should need in the way of
religion.”
68. “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.”
69. "The time you enjoy wasting is
not wasted time."
70. “The universe may have a purpose,
but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to
ours.”
71. “The view of the orthodox moralist (this includes the
police and the magistrates, but hardly any modern educators) on the question of
sex knowledge may, I fancy, be fairly stated as follows.... There is no doubt
that sexual misconduct is promoted by sexual thoughts, and that the best road
to virtue is to keep the young occupied in mind and body with matters wholly
unconnected with sex. They must, therefore, be told nothing whatever about sex;
they must as far as possible be prevented from talking about it with each
other, and grownups must pretend that there is no such topic. It is possible by
these means to keep a girl in ignorance until the night of her marriage, when
it is to be expected that the facts will so shock her as to produce exactly
that attitude towards sex which every sound moralist considers desirable in
women.”
72. "The whole problem with the
world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser
people so full of doubts."
73. “This is patently
absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be
frightened by absurdities.”
74. “To be able to fill leisure
intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few
people have reached this level.”
75. “To fear love is to fear life.”
76. “To teach men how to live without certainty,
and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing
philosophy can still do.”
77. “Vanity is a motive of
immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are
constantly performing some antic, and saying: "Look at me."
"Look at me" is one of the fundamental desires of human heart. It can
take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.
There was a Renaissance Italian princeling who was asked by a priest on his
death-bed if he had anything to repent of. "Yes," he said,
"there is one thing. On one occasion I had a visit from Emperor and the
Pope simultaneously. I took them to the top of my tower to see the view, and I
neglected the opportunity to throw them both down, which would have given me
immortal fame." History does not relate whether the priest gave him
absolution.”
78. “Very few men or women
who have had a conventional upbringing have learnt to feel decently about sex
and marriage. Their education has taught them that deceitfulness and lying are
considered virtues by parents and teachers; that sexual relations, even within
marriage, are more or less disgusting, and that in propagating the species men
are yielding to their animal nature while women are submitting to a painful
duty. This attitude has made marriage unsatisfying both to men and to women,
and the lack of instinctive satisfaction has turned to cruelty masquerading as
morality.”
79. ”War does not determine
who is right - only who is left.”
80. “We have, in fact, two
kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practise, and
another which we practise but seldom preach.”
81. “We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much,
and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.”
82. “What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.”
83. ”With equal passion I have sought
knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know
why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by
which number holds sway about the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have
achieved.”
84. “Young men and young women meet
each other with much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every
housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted
a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.”
Last update: June 4th, 2002.