Bertrand Russell Quotes

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Even as a teenager, I felt that for whatever reason that we were living very close to the end of human history. And now at my age I believe that with almost an increasing certainty.

The history of mankind is a history of war.

In human history, the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated.

We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

We have come to Earth in this great season in the long history of mankind. It is a marvelous age - the best of all.

But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it's absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born.

I think humans have always wrestled with the Divine Idea - an idea that unites and separates, creates and destroys, consoles and terrifies. Throughout human history, it is an idea that seems sometimes to have caused whole populations to rise up and slaughter one another.

The whole history of the world, on its broader lines, has been one of race conflict, wars, subjugation or extinction.

Big armies have always brought, not peace, but war which has ended in a hate that in due course brings another war.

War makes rattling good history; but peace is poor reading.

It is not known where he that invented the plough was born, nor where he died: yet he has effected more for the happiness of the world than the whole race of heroes and of conquerors, who have drenched it with tears, and manured it with blood, and whose birth, parentage, and education have been handed down to us with a precision proportionate to the mischief they have done.

If you use weapons of war to bring about peace, you're going to have more war and destruction.

War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.

But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.

The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.

When men have killed joy, I do not believe they still live.

Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.

The history of the world is like: He kills me, I kill him, only with different cosmetics and different castings. So in 2001, some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other.

The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

We've learned how to destroy, but not to create; how to waste, but not to build; how to kill men, but not how to save them; how to die, but seldom how to live.

We can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.