Bertrand Russell Quotes

Where the realm of freedom of thought and action begin, the determination of individuals according to generic laws ends.

For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.

So the life I have made May seem wrong to you But, I've never been surer It's my life to ruin My own way.

Everything is generated through your own will power. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. This is a democracy. You go where you want to go and do what you want to do.

A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it?

Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.

I cannot go and tell women what to wear and what not to wear; you have to decide on your own.

Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.

Duty does not require any person to submit to the destruction of his personal ambitions and the right to live his own life in his own way.

I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run-simply because I wanted to. I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

I care what people think, but it doesn't change my opinion of how to do things.

Allow the world to live as it chooses, and allow yourself to live as you choose.

I have no control whatsoever on how people perceive me from the Right or the Left. All I have control over is who I say I am.

Others will always seek to define you based on what they think you represent or who they think you are. But you have to be the one to control what you do and what you say and how you present yourself.

This is the kind of world I was born in, one in which I had only one reason for existence: pleasing others.

Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

My whole life is not defined by what Hollywood does.

Ultimately, what we're striving for is people being allowed to do what they want and not feeling they should or shouldn't do certain things.

I don't feel like anyone should follow what I did.

We can't stop anybody from doing what they want to do.

The demand for individual freedom leads us to different realms, and it enables us to participate in social events.

We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls.

I truly want what you truly want-nothing different and nothing more. Don't you see that is My greatest gift to you? If I wanted for you something other than what you want for you, and then went so far as to cause you to have it, where is your free choice? How can you be a creative being if I am dictating what you shall be, do, and have? My joy is in your freedom, not your compliance.

There are no limits to what you can create for you, because your ability to think is unlimited! But you cannot create other people's lives for them. You cannot think for them, and if you try to force your opinions on others you will only attract like forces to you. So let all others create the life they want.

But freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision.