424 quotes
There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment and then nothing.
Attributed to Russell in Ken Davis' Fire Up Your Life! (1995)
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.
Attributed A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996)
War does not determine who is right – only who is left.
Disputed
Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
Disputed to Russell in Prochnow's Speakers Handbook of Epigrams and Witticisms (1955)
No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.
Attributed
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
Attributed to Russell in Crainer's The Ultimate Book of Business Quotations (1997)
To choose one sock from each of infinitely many pairs of socks requires the Axiom of Choice, but for shoes the Axiom is not needed.
Attributed Williams' Weighing the Odds: A Course in Probability and Statistics (2001)
One must care about a world one will not see.
Disputed to Russell in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1997)
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
Misattributed
Not enough evidence God! Not enough evidence!
Disputed
If a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.
Misattributed
It's not the experience that happens to you: it's what you do with the experience that happens to you.
Attributed to Russell in Slaby's Sixty Ways to Make Stress Work for You (1987)
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure...
Attributed A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996)
In all affairs – love, religion, politics, or business – it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Disputed
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
Disputed
I've got a one-dimensional mind.
Attributed Said to Rupert Crawshay-Williams; Russell Remembered (1970)
Why? Surely they can find other men.
Attributed
Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure: a larger heart, and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain.
Attributed
It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. The difference is that you can compel your car to go to a garage, but you cannot compel Hitler to go to a psychiatrist.
Attributed A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996)
It seems that sin is geographical. From this conclusion, it is only a small step to the further conclusion that the notion of "sin" is illusory, and that the cruelty habitually practised in punishing it is unnecessary.
Attributed A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42 (1996)