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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.

Bertrand Russell

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Bertrand Russell
Age: 97 †
Born: 1872
Born: May 18
Died: 1970
Died: February 2
Analytic Philosopher
Autobiographer
Epistemologist
Essayist
Journalist
Logician
Mathematician
Metaphysician
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Tryleg
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Russell
Bertrand Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Bertrand Russell
Earl Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Free
Established
Thought
Destructive
Great
Revolutionary
Privilege
Institutions
Habit
Merciless
Comfortable
Subversive
Terrible
Swift

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of that joy. ... I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
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The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.
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Indemnity for the past and security for the future.
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In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.
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dont let the old break you let the love make you
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Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.
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Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
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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.
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Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.
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The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
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Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more elevated and spiritual moralists are concerned.
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The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.
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Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
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Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.
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No opinion has ever been too errant to become a creed.
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A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.
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Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken.
Bertrand Russell
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Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable.
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The first step in wisdom, as well as in morality, is to open the windows of the ego as wide as possible.
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There was, I think, never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle.
Bertrand Russell