Bertrand Russell — "The greatest happiness of the greatest number is no more than a formula for avoi…"
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is no more than a formula for avoiding the difficult problem of how to make people happy.
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More from Bertrand Russell
"Among those who are rich enough to choose their way of life, the particular brand of unendurable boredom from which they suffer is due, paradoxical as this may seem, to their fear of boredom."
"The only thing that I strongly feel worthwhile would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world."
"It is a misfortune for a man to have too much money and too little education."
"Children are not born with a sense of sin, but are taught it by their parents."
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
About Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
British philosopher, logician, and Nobel literature laureate (1950) who co-authored Principia Mathematica with Whitehead and led 20th-century pacifist and nuclear-disarmament campaigns. Closely associated with Alfred North Whitehead (Principia Mathematica co-author) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (his student-then-rival). For an intellectual contrast, see F.H. Bradley, British Idealist philosopher — Russell's 1898 break with Bradley's neo-Hegelian Idealism — and his subsequent logical-atomism — is the founding moment of the Anglo-American analytic philosophy tradition that displaced Idealism for a century. Russell's entire early career is structured against Bradley's metaphysics of internal relations.
The standard scholarly entry points to Bertrand Russell's work: Ray Monk (Southampton, philosophy biographer) — Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 (1996); A.C. Grayling (New College of the Humanities) — Russell: A Very Short Introduction (1996). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Bertrand Russell.