Bertrand Russell quotes

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

— Bertrand Russell

“Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

“Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.”

— Bertrand Russell

“Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.”

— 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

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

“With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.”

— Bertrand Russell