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.
Bertrand Russell
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Bertrand Russell
No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
Bertrand Russell
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power.
Bertrand Russell
It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell
There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
Bertrand Russell
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.
Bertrand Russell
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
Bertrand Russell
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.
Bertrand Russell
All definite knowledge — so I should contend — belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
I cannot believe — and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable — that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.
Bertrand Russell
In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.
Bertrand Russell
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Bertrand Russell |
