Bertrand Russell

Life and hope for the world are to be found only in the deeds of love.

Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty... and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes.

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

There are three ways of securing a society that shall be stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that of general misery except for a powerful minority.

Love is a little haven of refuge from the world.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

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.

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.

Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of the world.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

Gradually, ... the aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature. It is because science gives us the power of manipulating nature that it has more social importance than art. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art. Science as a technique, though it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire.

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Men have physical needs, and they have emotions. While physical needs are unsatisfied, they take first place; but when they are satisfied, emotions unconnected with them become important in deciding whether a man is to be happy or unhappy.

The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.