Russell is the greatest logician since Aristotle, but he is not always quite reasonable or consistent, partly, I think, because he is a socialist who has never discarded an aristocratic outlook.
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Nancy Mitford, 'Bertrand Bedazzled by Euclid and Free Love', a LIFE book review of Russell's Autobiography, 28 April 1967.Bertrand Russell
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In my political outlook, I'm nationalist! In my social outlook, I'm socialist! In my religious outlook, I'm completely theist! That I am! I'm not a communist, not at all satellite of any other "-ism" in the world! I'm just pro-Indonesia! I'll fight and work and sacrifice myself for this Indonesian people, this Indonesian fatherland of mine!!
Sukarno
Russell's is undeniably one of the great minds of our time. It has always been impelled by a passionate and relentless curiosity and a hatred of cruelty and injustice. An aristocratic gadfly, he has never for any reason hesitated to speak out on any issue that engaged him.
Although born in the Victorian era... he seems more like an 18th Century figure from the Age of Reason like Voltaire, whom he strikingly resembles both in physiognomy and spirit. Philosophy is an abstruse subject, which Russell once defined as an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously; the fame of philosophers seldom spreads beyond the confines of university campuses. But Russell's has, because for the last 40 years he has striven to think about complex current issues — politics, history, ethics, economics — and to convey his thoughts to those who longed for insight in language they could understand. And whatever Bertrand Russell has done, wherever he has gone there has usually been laughter.Bertrand Russell
This is the great paradox of Russell. All his instincts were on the side of the "rationalists"; his greatest hatred was for those who exalted emotion, or any sort of mystic intuition, at the expense of reason. But because Russell was the greatest rationalist of all, he had to admit that reason cannot prove the mystics wrong. In fact, in some private moods he was a mystic himself.
Bertrand Russell
Socialist authors promise not only wealth for all, but also happiness in love for everybody, the full physical and spiritual development of each individual, the unfolding of great artistic and scientific talents in all men, etc. Only recently Trotsky stated in one of his writings that in the socialist society "the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” 1 The socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. All socialist literature is full of such nonsense. But it is just this nonsense that wins it the most supporters.
Leon Trotsky
I want to go rapidly towards my objective. But fundamentally even the results of action do not worry me so much. Action itself, so long as I am convinced that it is right action, gives me satisfaction. In my general outlook on life I am a socialist and it is a socialist order that I should like to see established in India and the world.
Jawaharlal Nehru
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