Bertrand Russell

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.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

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.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

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.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.