UK, 1872–1970
Bertrand Russell
British logician, philosopher, and public intellectual. Co-author of Principia Mathematica, and later a passionate voice for peace and free thought.
Bertrand Russell in 37 lines
Every Bertrand Russell passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“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 good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
“I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.”
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”
“Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.”
“What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation.”
“Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”
“Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.”
“I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.”
“What does not exist must be something, or it would be meaningless to deny its existence; and hence we need the concept of being, as that which belongs even to the non-existent.”
“Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.”
“All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.”
“Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.”
“Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.”
“Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”
“The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.”
“Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.”
“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.”
“Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.”
“When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.”
“Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.”
“No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.”
“I don't like the spirit of socialism – I think freedom is the basis of everything.”
“How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.”
“The principal source of the harm done by the State is the fact that power is its chief end.”
“No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.”
“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”
“Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.”
“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.”
“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”
“Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.”
Where Bertrand Russell lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Everyone in the room is avoiding the obvious problem.
You are choosing truth over group comfort. The danger is using truth as a way to dominate the room.
You have to decide before you feel certain.
You are honoring the difference between confidence and knowledge. The risk is making doubt infinite.
The evidence is discouraging, but hope keeps returning.
You are asking belief to answer to the world. The risk is letting evidence become a costume for fear.
Someone who shaped you turns out to have done real harm.
You are judging the idea on its own evidence rather than its origin. The risk is a convenient rule you apply only to teachers you loved.
You can be widely liked or clearly respected, not both here.
You are testing whether the trade-off is real before paying it. The danger is using nuance to avoid ever standing anywhere.
You were wrong in public and no one has noticed yet.
You are treating your credibility as something built by corrections rather than damaged by them. The risk is performing humility as its own kind of vanity.
You are the only person who seems to see the problem.
You are converting conviction into something others can check. The cost is time the problem may not give you.
A past version of your life keeps looking better than this one.
You are testing the comparison before letting it judge the present. The cost is dismantling a comfort that was doing real work.
Reading Bertrand Russell today
Bertrand Russell wrote in 1872–1970, from UK — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Bertrand Russell is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 37 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
- Henry David Thoreau — USA, 1817–1862
Argues the same cases
Socrates, Confucius, Lao Tzu, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, René Descartes take positions on the same dilemmas as Bertrand Russell, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.