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Danh ngôn của Bertrand Russell (Sứ mệnh: 8)

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
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.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
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.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
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.
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.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
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.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
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.
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
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.
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
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.
The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
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.
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.
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.