top of page
.png){kind=small}
"If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Society quotes
"Society has a herd psychology, so until we have more good shepherds we are lost."
"The world is "sick" with loneliness in spite of multitudes of people living in it."
"Take responsibility for the city."
"Measures must always in a progressive society be held superior to men, who are after all imperfect instruments, working for their fulfilment."
"When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read."
Explore more quotes by Bertrand Russell
"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."
"You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application."
"The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved."
"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."
"Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached."
"The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation."
"But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations."
"Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce 'proofs' of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors - Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' - but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions."
"I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and now."
bottom of page