Bertrand Russell

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.

What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.

The 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.

Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Love, children, and work, are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.

Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.

Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.

Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.

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.

The best practical advice I can give to the present generation is to practice the virtue which the Christians call love.

Our use of the phrase 'The Dark Ages' to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. [...] From India to Spain, the brilliant civilisation of Islam flourished. What was lost to Christendom at this time was not lost to civilisation, but quite the contrary. [...] To us it seems that West-European civilisation is civilisation, but this is a narrow view.

No great achievement is possible without persistent work.

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.

Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.

Drunkeness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh - a process taking (say) 500 years.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the second chance were offered me.

That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.