15 Bertrand Russell Quotes on Culture

Bertrand Russell quotes on culture

2. I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.

11. No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

45. Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

57. The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

104. Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.

119. Young men and young women meet each other with much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.

121. Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.

127. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

139. Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilisation than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.

146. He founded a religion, of which the main tenets were transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans.

165. Pragmatists explained that Truth is what it pays to believe. Historians of morals reduced the Good to a matter of tribal custom. Beauty was abolished by artists in a revolt against the surgary insipidities of a philistine epoch and in a mood of fury in which satisfaction is to be derived only from what hurts. And so the world was swept clear not only of God as a person but of God's essence as a ideal to which man owed an ideal allegiance.

191. As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me.

195. I used to go to [Einstein's] house, once a week to discuss with him and Godel and Pauli. These discussions were in some ways disappointing, for, although all three of them were Jews and exiles and, in intention, cosmopolitans, I found that they all had German bias toward metaphysics... Godel turned out to be an unadulterated Platonist, and apparently believed that an eternal 'not' was laid up in heaven, where virtuous logicians might hope to meet it hereafter.

217. I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream. He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down books, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia Mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated....

222. It is impossible to describe Bertrand Russell except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter.