Bertrand Russell Zitate auf Englisch

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The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Bertrand Russell

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

Bertrand Russell

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

Bertrand Russell

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

Bertrand Russell

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

Bertrand Russell

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Bertrand Russell

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

Bertrand Russell

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Bertrand Russell

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

Bertrand Russell

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Bertrand Russell

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

Bertrand Russell

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

Bertrand Russell

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

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Bertrand Russell

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Bertrand Russell

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

Bertrand Russell

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Bertrand Russell

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Bertrand Russell

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

Bertrand Russell

Sin is geographical.

Bertrand Russell

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

Bertrand Russell

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Bertrand Russell

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

Bertrand Russell

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

Bertrand Russell

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Bertrand Russell

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

Bertrand Russell

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

Bertrand Russell

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Bertrand Russell

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Bertrand Russell

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Bertrand Russell