"The atomic bomb embodies the results of a combination genius and patience as remarkable as any in the history of mankind."
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Bertrand Russell quotes (page 31 of 60)
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"In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more."
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"Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say."
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"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf."
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"What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry."
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"Love is a little haven of refuge from the world."
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"Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man."
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"... the word "theory" ... was originally an Orphic word, which Cornford interprets as "passionate sympathetic contemplation" ... For Pythagoras, the "passionate sympathetic contemplation" was intellectual, and issued in mathematical knowledge ... To those who have reluctantly learnt a little mathematics in school this may seem strange; but to those who have experienced the intoxicating delight of sudden understanding that mathematics gives, from time to time, to those who love it, the Pythagorean view will seem completely natural."
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"The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence"
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"In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details. But in history the matter is far otherwise. Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws."
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"The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent."
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"We are ... led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by "soft" data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful."
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"Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale"
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"This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate."
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"The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil."
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"Science, in its ultimate ideal, consists of a set of propositions arranged in a hierarchy, the lowest level of the hierarchy being concerned with particular facts, and the highest with some general law, governing everything in the universe. The various levels in the hierarchy have a two-fold logical connection, travelling one up, one down; the upward connection proceeds by induction, the downward by deduction."
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"It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit; divorced from it, they remain barren."
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