Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
"There are three ways of securing a society that shall be stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that…"
"Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution."
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd."
"I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that there are no Greek gods."
"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."
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.
Your cart is empty
