Bertrand Russell

“Yo no nací dichoso. De niño, mi himno favorito era: «Cansado del mundo y con el peso de mis pecados». A los cinco años yo pensaba que si había de vivir setenta no había pasado aún más que la...”

“The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by ho...”

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of...”

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

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.”

“I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and now.”

“We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.”

“Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a s...”

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know”

“It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or in...”

“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.”

“La Ciencia en ningún momento está totalmente en lo cierto, pero rara vez está completamente equivocada y tiene en general mayores posibilidades de estar en lo cierto que las teorías no cient...”

“Perfect rationality consists, not in believing what is true, but in attaching to every proposition a degree of belief corresponding to its degree of credibility.”

“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”

“Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”

“Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.”

“Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge...”

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”

“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.”

“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 acc...”