I do not know who my biographer may be, but I should like him to report ‘with what flourish he will’ something like this: ‘I was not a solemn stained-glass saint, existing only for purposes of edification; I existed from my own center, many things that I did were regrettable, I did not respect respectable […]
Bertrand Russell Quotes
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
It’s 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.
At the age of eighteen… I read Mill’s Autobiography, where I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made God?’. This led me to abandon the ‘First Cause’ argument, and to become an atheist. […]
I think that in philosophical strictness at the level where one doubts the existence of material objects and holds that the world may have existed for only five minutes, I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God […]
I was told that the Chinese said that they would would bury me by the Western lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very “chic” for an atheist.
Some astronomers try to cheer us up in the moments of depression by assuring us that one fine day the sun will explode, and in the twinkling of an eye we shall all be turned into gas. I do not know whether this is going to happen, nor when it will happen if it does […]
Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
