Bertrand Russell

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

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

"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."

"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths."

"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."

"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards."

"In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word."

"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."

"Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives."

"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."

"Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one."

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."

"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."

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

"The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them."

"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf."

"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 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."

"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."

"Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give."

"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."