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
"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution."
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
"The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."
"I should not hold it desirable that either a man or a woman should enter upon the serious business of a marriage intended to lead to children without having had previous sexual experience."
"The most fundamental of all moral duties is to exercise our intelligence to the utmost."
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.