Bertrand Russell

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; licence, the right to do what you like.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.