Bertrand Russell

Anything you're good at, you should do.

The greatest problem of our time is how to put men in touch with the world.

It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary to kill off nine-tenths of the present population.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

I am firmly convinced that the better we know the world, the less we shall be inclined to believe in God and immortality.

Of all the forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

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

The most fundamental of all moral duties is to exercise our intelligence to the utmost.

It is a truism that in this world there is always more misery than happiness.

I hate the world and almost all the people in it.

I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.

The only thing that I strongly feel worthwhile would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world.

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

I should not hold it desirable that either a man or a woman should enter upon the serious business of a marriage intended to lead to children without having had previous sexual experience.

It seems on the whole fair to regard Negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from the question of humanity) would be highly undesirable.

There are three ways of securing a society that shall be stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that of general misery except for a powerful minority.

War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.

Our nominal morality has been formulated by priests and mentally enslaved women. It is time that men who have to take a normal part in the normal life of the world learned to rebel against this sickly nonsense.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.