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To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.
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
Actual
Beginning
Wisdom
Wish
Understand
World
More quotes by Bertrand Russell
When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to know
Bertrand Russell
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Bertrand Russell
God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.
Bertrand Russell
In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.
Bertrand Russell
In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.
Bertrand Russell
The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.
Bertrand Russell
It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion.
Bertrand Russell
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
Bertrand Russell
True happiness for human beings is possible only to those who develop their godlike potentialities to the utmost.
Bertrand Russell
Perhaps the nuclear physicists have come so near to the ultimate secrets that He thinks it time to bring their activities to a stop. And what simpler method could He devise than to let them carry their ingenuity to the point where they exterminate the human race?
Bertrand Russell
Ants and savages put strangers to death.
Bertrand Russell
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
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell
My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.
Bertrand Russell
In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.
Bertrand Russell
In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.
Bertrand Russell
Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
Bertrand Russell
A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.
Bertrand Russell
The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.
Bertrand Russell
A priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.
Bertrand Russell
