Quote

The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults from children.

Bertrand Russell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Adults
Civilization
Forethought
Character
Distinguishes
Firsts
Brutes
First
Mainly
Children
Essential
Men
Essentials
Indeed

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

Image
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Bertrand Russell
Image
No opinion has ever been too errant to become a creed.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
Bertrand Russell
Image
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.
Bertrand Russell
Image
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
Image
One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.
Bertrand Russell
Image
When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The Eugenic Society . . . is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms no fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The method of postulating what we want has many advantages they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Bertrand Russell
Image
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
Bertrand Russell
Image
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.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The axiomatic method has many advantages over honest work.
Bertrand Russell