All Quotes

"But contrast the attitude of the Socialist Government towards their Bolshevist friends and their attitude to the great self-governing Dominions of the Crown. To the enemies of Britain, of civilization, of freedom, to those who deserted us in the crises of the war—smiles, compliments, caresses, cash. But for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, who sent their brave men to fight and die by scores of thousands, who never flinched and never wearied, who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh—to them nothing but frigid repulsion. Our bread for the Bolshevist serpent; our aid for the foreigner of every country; our favours for the Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans, on whom the future of the British island and nation depends, only the cold stones of indifference, aversion, and neglect. (Cheers.) That is the policy with which the Socialist Government confronts us, and against that policy we will strive to marshal the unconquerable might of Britain."

"Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities...Surely if a sense of self-preservation still exists among men, if the will to live resides not merely in individuals or nations but in humanity as a whole, the prevention of the supreme catastrophe ought to be the paramount object of all endeavour."

"I am most anxious that in dealing with matters which every Member knows are extremely delicate matters, I should not use any phrase or expression which would cause offence to our friends and Allies on the Continent or across the Atlantic Ocean."

"To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often."

"The follies of Socialism are inexhaustible... Even among themselves they have twenty discordant factions who hate one another even more than they hate you and me. Their insincerity! Can you not feel a sense of disgust at the arrogant presumption of superiority of these people?.... Then when it comes to practice, down they fall with a wallop not only to the level of ordinary human beings but to a level which is even far below the average."

"Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent."

"Let them [Socialists] abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous, fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality... they will increase the well-being of the world."

"I have never taken the view which seems to give so much pleasure to morbid and misanthropic minds, a view which they have spread so widely through the United States, that Britain is "down and out," that the foundations of her commercial and industrial greatness have been sapped, that the stamina of her people is impaired, that her workmen are mutinous and lazy, that her employers are pleasure-loving and benighted, that her institutions are crumbling, and that her Empire is falling to pieces."

"I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire."

"Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you — another "British Gazette.""

"A sheep in sheep's clothing."

"What a man! I have lost my heart! … If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism. … Your movement has rendered a service to the whole world. The greatest fear that ever tormented every Democratic or Socialist leader was that of being outbid or surpassed by some other leader more extreme than himself. It has been said that a continual movement to the Left, a kind of fatal landslide toward the abyss, has been the character of all revolutions. Italy has shown that there is a way to combat subversive forces."

"Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of stabilized society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism."

"Although trade is important, there are other and stronger bonds of Empire, and since the Conference of 1926 nothing but common interests and traditions have held the Empire together. But those are mighty ties, incomprehensible to Europeans, which have drawn millions of men from the far corners of the earth to the battlefields of France, and we must trust to them to continue to draw us together."

"Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production."

"The rescue of India from ages of barbarism, tyranny, and internecine war and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilisation constitute upon the whole the finest achievement of our history."

"Hers, pron. His."

"Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amok by hamstringing it."

"Optimist, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white."

"Virtues, n. pl. Certain abstentions."

"Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen."

"Un-American, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish."

"Ambition, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead."

"Amnesty, n. The state’s magnaminity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish."

"Capital, n. The seat of misgovernment."

"True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical."

"The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling."

"Apologize, v. To lay the foundation for a future offense."

"Bacchus, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk."

"Back, n. That part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate in your adversity."

"Backbite, v.t. To speak of a man as you find him when he can't find you."

"Barometer, n. An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having."

"Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters."

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."

"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."

"The war in Indochina had revived the passionate side of Bertrand Russell’s character. His political activities had spanned two world wars and he was to spend the last years of his life completely immersed in the battles that were being fought in Vietnam. He used the enormous authority that his name enjoyed throughout the world to aid the Vietnamese cause."

"The popular conception of a philosopher as one who combines universal learning with the direction of human conduct was more nearly satisfied by Bertrand Russell than by any other philosopher of our time."

"Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man."

"(What are your feelings about the Johnson trial arranged by Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell in Paris?) I admire Bertrand Russell very much, and I certainly welcome any instrument which may help to arrest the American madness."

"Bertrand Russell found Frege's famous error: Frege had overlooked what is now known as the Russell paradox. Namely, Frege's rules allowed one to define the class of x such that P(x) is true for any "concept" P. Frege's idea was that such a class was an object itself, the class of objects "falling under the concept P." Russell used this principle to define the class R of concepts that do not fall under themselves. This concept leads to a contradiction... argument: (1) if R falls under itself then it does not fall under itself; (2) this contradiction shows that it does not fall under itself; (3) therefore by definition it does fall under itself after all."

"What a contrast between the audacious philosophy of Dante reposeful, contemplative, infinitely confident and this view! To Russell, man is but the chance and temporary product of a blind and purposeless nature, an irrelevant spectator of her doings, almost an alien intruder on her domain."

"Bertrand Russell is the key defining figure of analytic philosophy."

"All Bertrand Russell said about [his meeting with Einstein] (apart from how wonderful Einstein looked, and his wonderful eyes) was that Einstein told him a dirty story. I said that Einstein was well known for consummate tact in adapting himself to his company."

"The mind of Bertrand Russell is the anthropomorphized apex of supreme intelligence."

"The great thing about [Russell] is that he will not give in – to prudence, cynicism or simple horse sense. Sometime, somewhere, he agonizes, the rational man will make a decent world of his instincts. Considered as a type, he is a perennial scold. But considered as Bertrand Russell, he is surely one of the glories of our time... For he is at once a man of unyielding honesty, a first-class intellect and the possessor of one of the master styles of the English language. It is the last of these gifts that guarantees the onlooker an unflagging fascination with his life. For it gives charm to many a frailty, makes the world over every day in the light of his intelligence and his irony, and converts every political crusade, exchange of learned correspondence and lovers' quarrel into an episode as enchanting as a Mozart concerto."

"There have been two Bertrand Russells: one who died during the war; and another who rose out of that one's shroud, an almost mystic communist born out of the ashes of a mathematical logician. Perhaps there was a tender mystic strain in him always; represented at first by a mountain of algebraic formulae; and then finding a distorted expression in a socialism that has the earmarks rather of a religion than of a philosophy. The most characteristic title among his books is Mysticism and Logic: a merciless attack on the illogicality of mysticism, followed by such a glorification of scientific method as makes one think of the mysticism of logic. Russell inherits the English positivist tradition, and is resolved to be tough-minded, because he knows that he cannot...It is remarkable that after writing several volumes of this learned moonshine, Bertrand Russell should suddenly come down upon the surface of this planet, and begin to reason very passionately about war, and government, and socialism, and revolution,– and never once make use of the impeccable formulae piled like Pelion upon Ossa in his Principia Mathematica. Nor has anyone else, observably, made use of them...Freedom is the supreme good; for without it personality is impossible. Freedom of thought and speech would go like a cleansing draught through the neuroses and superstitions of the "modern" mind. For we are not so educated as we think; we are but beginning the great experiment of universal schooling; and it has not had time to affect profoundly our ways of thinking and our public life. We are building the equipment, but we are still primitive in methods and technique; we think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind. The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man is the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions; the scientist is slow to believe, and never speaks without modification...There is nothing that man might not do if our splendid organization of schools and universities were properly developed and properly manned, and directed intelligently to the reconstruction of human character. This, and not violent revolution, or paper legislation, is the way out of economic greed and international brutality. Man has come to control all other forms of life because he has taken more time in which to grow up; when he takes still more time, and spends that time more wisely, he may learn even to control arid. remake himself. Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia...All in all, a very lovable man: capable of the profoundest metaphysics and the subtlest mathematics, and yet speaking always simply, with the clarity which comes only to those who are sincere; a man addicted to fields of thought that usually dry up the springs of feeling, and yet warmed and illumined with pity, full of an almost mystic tenderness for mankind. Not a courtier, but surely a scholar and a gentleman, and a better Christian than some who mouth the word. Happily, he is still young and vigorous, the flame of life burns brightly in him yet; who knows but this next decade will see him grow out of disillusionment into wisdom, and write his name among the highest in "the serene brotherhood of philosophs"?"

"Bertrand Russell, as all reading America knows, has a right to be proud of his name in respect of his own achievements. He is, I believe, a very great mathematician. But he is also a profound thinker on human affairs, and unlike so many important thinkers, he can write. His thoughts do not have to be dug up for general consumption out of long, badly constructed books full of highly technical terms. They reach us in small, clearly constructed books, and in English that is not only beautifully simple but often poetic…"

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."

"Lieber Bertrand Russell! Ich habe schon lange den Wunsch, Ihnen zu schreiben. Nichts anderes wollte ich dabei, als Ihnen meine hohe Bewunderung ausdrücken. Die Klarheit, Sicherheit und Unparteilichkeit, mit der Sie die logischen, philosophischen und menschlichen Dinge in Ihren Büchern behandelt haben, steht nicht nur in unserer Generation unerreicht da."