{"author":"Bertrand Russell","author_id":"Bertrand+Russell","total_quotes":327,"quotes":[{"text":"The belief that personality is mysterious and irreducible has no scientific warrant, and is accepted chiefly because it is flattering to our human self esteem.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["philosophy","science","self"],"id":280,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["anarchism","communism","labor","socialism","syndicalism","violence"],"id":343,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["philosophy"],"id":5057,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"The habit of looking into the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["present"],"id":5579,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["life","happy","great "],"id":10028,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["happiness"],"id":11194,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"What hunger is in relation to food  zest is in relation to life.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["enthusiasm"],"id":11669,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"One obvious palliative of the evils of democracy in its present form would be to encourage much more publicity and initiative on the part of civil servants. They ought to have the right, and, on occasion, the duty, to frame Bills in their own names, and set forth publicly the arguments in their favor.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["experts","expression","freedom-of-expression","rationality","thought"],"id":12206,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["inspirational"],"id":15722,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"},{"text":"When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.","author":"Bertrand Russell","tags":["argument","belief","disagreement","fallibility","force","infallible","science"],"id":18871,"author_id":"Bertrand+Russell"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":327,"pages":33,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}