Bertrand Russell Quotes

The progress and civilisation of the human race simply mean controlling this nature.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.

Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

What's been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.

Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.

How great seems human progress when we consider where it began, and how insignificant, when we contemplate the goals for which itstrives.

Not nature, but the "genius of mankind," has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

It's only a slight exaggeration to say we haven't progressed much beyond the invention of agriculture when it comes to our view of the natural world.

I'm a very good decision maker because I have core set of principles and so I can make decisions. Decisions can be very hard and you have to wrestle with them, but I'm able to get all the data on the table and figure out what would be the best decision because decisions mean ill for some people and mean positives for others.

Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.

I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.

Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

Everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.

If man could apply half the ingenuity he’s exhibited in the creation of weapons to more sensible ends, there’s no limit to what he might yet accomplish

And yet humanity is so not evolved that how can you expect anything absolutely major to happen? Look how long, we move ahead in technology, how much do we move ahead in morality or emotion? We move ahead so minimally, minimally, minimally.

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.

But we must admit the possibility that continued investigation and experience will bring us ever nearer to that solemn moment, when the first man will rise from earth by means of wings, if only for a few seconds, and mark that historical moment which heralds the inauguration of a new era in our civilization.

Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.

I think in general the ends do not justify the means.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

Humanity's true purpose is not to become stronger physically, it's to become more intelligent-from armies, who increasingly fight with specialized units rather than regiments and tanks, to garage owners, who use a lot more than jacks to fix your engine. As intelligence prevails throughout humanity, maybe there'll be fewer wars and better cars.

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.