Bertrand Russell

“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”

“The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.”

“The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.”

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”

“In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”

“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.”

“Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.”

“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”

“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.”

“Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.”

“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.”

“Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.”

“Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.”

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.”

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.”

“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.”

“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.”

“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.”

“To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.”

“It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.”

“Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.”

“Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.”

“Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.”