“Russell’s books should be bound in two colors…those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.”

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“Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.”

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“Philosophy is not a theory but an activity... like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.”

from Personal Recollections (1981)

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“For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”

from Personal Recollections (1981)

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“If a person tells me he has been to the worst places, I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.”

from Personal Recollections (1981)

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“It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.”

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“Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in 'explaining' symptoms of an illness.)”

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“If life becomes hard to bear, we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change—a change in our own attitude—hardly even occurs to us”

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“You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.”

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“If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

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from Culture and Value (1980)

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“Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”

from Culture and Value (1980)

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“Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?”

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“Suppose it were forbidden to say ‘I know’, only allowed to say ‘I believe I know’?”

from On Certainty

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“When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change... what men and women consider reasonable alters. At certain periods, men and women find reasonable what at other periods they found unreasonable. And vice versa.”

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“perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating... His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody”

— Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”

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“What struck me most was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything... One had to 'live' truth and not tolerate any pretense in oneself or others... Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself.”

— Friedrich Hayek 1899 – 1992 CE

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“Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.”

— John Maynard Keynes 1883 – 1946 CE
Revolutionary economist credited with saving capitalism

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