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There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.

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
Ideas
Reason
Must
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Really
Suppose
Things
Beginning
World
Poverty
Thoughts
Idea

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.
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Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
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Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation.
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[Kant] was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed imjplicitly in the maximx that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.
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True happiness for human beings is possible only to those who develop their godlike potentialities to the utmost.
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Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.
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Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.
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The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.
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We must be skeptical even of our skepticism.
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The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
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The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.
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Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.
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Plato has dramatic strength ... but is quite unaware of the strength of the argument against his position ... and allows himself to be grossly unfair in arguing against it.
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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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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.
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Dr. Arnold . . . the admired reformer of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst of furious indignation against this opinion will be forced to the conclusion that he enjoyed inflicting floggings.
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It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.
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Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be.
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The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
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One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did
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