Bertrand Russell Quotes

You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.

It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action.

Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.

They say I'm a revolutionary, but they're all wrong.

We had thought you had been ruler over your land ... but now we perceive that there be other men that do rule, and not men but peasants and merchants ... and you flow in your maidenly estate like a maid.

Americans have always been amongst the most revolutionary people of the world.

The spirit of the age is the very thing a great man changes.

Trotsky has earned it by his brilliant and unflagging work

... combines a limited outlook with strong qualities of resistance.

Tecumseh is one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.

Who, if not the revolutionary intelligentsia, could promote the political development of the working class?

Being a man of very few ideas, he cherished those he had with an exaggerated care.

He is stern and severe—with fixed principles of duty which nothing on earth will make him change; very clever I do not think him, and his mind is an uncivilized one; his education has been neglected; politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in; the arts and all softer occupations he is insensible to, but he is sincere, I am certain, sincere even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that that is the only way to govern; he is not, I am sure, aware of the dreadful cases of individual misery which he so often causes, for I can see by various instances that he is kept in utter ignorance of many things, which his people carry out in most corrupt ways, while he thinks that he is extremely just.

… contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

Russians would make charming visitors at New-Yorke, and civilize that part of America wonderfully.

Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.

The Catholic Church has always exploited the working classes…. Your religion I spit on as I do on all religions, -- on Orthodox, Jewish, Mohammedan, and the rest. There is no law here but Soviet Law and by that law you must die

As much as people want to call me a bomb-thrower, look at my record.

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values

The wild Irish … are barbarous and most filthy in their diet.

Russia is corrupt, treacherous, shifty and incompetent.

Bolshevism is organized civil war.

… the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples, instead of the most westerly of easterns, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle.

The Irish on both sides are giving me a lot of trouble just at a difficult moment…. I sometimes wish we could submerge the whole lot of them and their Island for say, ten years, under the waves of the Atlantic.