Quote

That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.

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
History
Astonishing
Political
Literary
People
Republic
Decent
Perhaps
Example
Snobbery
Side
Admired
Sides
Plato

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

Image
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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
A fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Patriotism which has the quality of intoxication is a danger not only to its native land but to the world, and My country never wrong is an even more dangerous maxim than My country, right or wrong.
Bertrand Russell
Image
As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our trouble. . . . No Catholic, for instance, takes seriously the text which says that a Bishop should be the husband of one wife.
Bertrand Russell
Image
If one lived for ever the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is, they remain perennially fresh.
Bertrand Russell
Image
To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.
Bertrand Russell
Image
If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one's happiness would be increased
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
If the West can claim superiority in anything, it is . . . in science and scientific technique.
Bertrand Russell
Image
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Bertrand Russell
Image
For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.
Bertrand Russell
Image
The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.
Bertrand Russell
Image
Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
Bertrand Russell
Image
It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare.
Bertrand Russell
Image
I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.
Bertrand Russell