Quote

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

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
Humans
View
Source
Lucretius
Views
Untold
Race
Atheist
Religion
Misery
Born
Atheism
Fear
Regard
Human
Disease

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

Image
Some `advanced thinkers' are of the opinion that anyone who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion if it were not, truth would be easier to come by than it is.
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 great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.
Bertrand Russell
Image
To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.
Bertrand Russell
Image
William James used to preach the will-to-believe. For my part, I should wish to preach the will-to-doubt. None of our beliefs are quite true all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell
Image
All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs and if these are rejected, nothing is left.
Bertrand Russell
Image
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.
Bertrand Russell
Image
It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.
Bertrand Russell
Image
So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.
Bertrand Russell
Image
There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
Bertrand Russell
Image
In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken.
Bertrand Russell
Image
All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of science.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Bertrand Russell
Image
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell