Bertrand Russell Quotes

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.

A national education ought uniformly to be discouraged, on account of its obvious alliance with national government. This is an alliance of a more formidable nature than the old and much contested alliance of church and state.

When I ordered my royal penitent to do or to leave undone anything, under penalty of mortal sin, I was obeyed;

We should not need to displace the fact of their [the Iranians] bravery into categories like fanaticism and martyrdom in order to comprehend it… Governments and generals need naïve young men in order to fight for them.

The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.

Nothing is a sin when you obey the orders of a priest

I'm plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie.

No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument - the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Führer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"

When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They’ve substituted a toothless ‘freedom of worship’ for ‘freedom of religion’.

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

Religion makes kind people say unkind things: "I must prove my faith, so mutilate the genitals of my children." They wouldn't do that if God didn't tell them to do so.

The word patriotism, or its equivalents and derivations, is upon everyone's lips at the present time. It is a magic word which is thought by most people to cover any multitude of sins. To be patriotic in whatever cause is tantamount to being virtuous, while no worse charge can be brought against a man in popular estimation than to say he is unpatriotic.

This American government has become very adept at attaching labels to people who defend themselves, so that the general population in America will condone their behavior.

Government's power to bully people who have broken no law is dangerous to all of us.

Suppose, however, that God did give this law to the Jews, and did tell them that whenever a man preached a heresy, or proposed to worship any other God that they should kill him; and suppose that afterward this same God took upon himself flesh, and came to this very chosen people and taught a different religion, and that thereupon the Jews crucified him; I ask you, did he not reap exactly what he had sown? What right would this god have to complain of a crucifixion suffered in accordance with his own command?

When I talk about people wrapping themselves in the flag and hiding behind Jesus - that's an anti-intellectual thing to do in the political process, because legally, allegedly we have a separation between church and state. That's a legal precedent that's never observed. When people are trying to do something that's not in your best interest, they will wrap it in the flag and hide behind Jesus, which is a corrupt thing to do.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!

I didn't understand the concept that there's a state that won't allow its people to leave or come back whenever they want to, by saying, "It's because we love you." And I never get that - I still don't get that concept. I thought, that's very threatening, and I don't get why you would want to make this experiment with Germany separation.

Most people think that there is a monarchy, where God is the king and we are the subjects, and the subjects are inferior to this invisible king. But not only are we inferior, we are also stained by sin, and therefore, untrustworthy.

In a dictatorship there is no choice, the elections are controlled, the police are the military, fear equals control, speech is suppressed, the economy is looted, the people are slaves.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state.

Many people in America throw the term "fascism" around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.

My face on every coin engraved, the anarchists are all enslaved. My flag is forever waved, by the grateful people I have saved.

We are under [government's] control, and if people don't realize that, they haven't looked around. And if they're not paranoid, they haven't thought about it.

All these fine Christian-type people that seem to think they know what God wants for all of us, that's certainly more of a sin then anything they would claim about us. To judge people is one of the greatest sins.