Bertrand Rus­sell, the good British philoso­pher and social crit­ic, appeared on the BBC pro­gram Face-to-Face in 1959 and was requested a clos­ing ques­tion: What would you inform a gen­er­a­tion liv­ing 1,000 years from now concerning the life you’ve lived and the teachings you’ve realized? His reply is brief, however pithy. You may learn a tran­script beneath:

I ought to prefer to say two issues, one intel­lec­tu­al and one ethical:

The intel­lec­tu­al factor I ought to wish to say to them is that this: When you find yourself examine­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self solely what are the info and what’s the fact that the info bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed both by what you want to consider or by what you suppose would have benef­i­cent social results if it had been believed, however look solely and sole­ly at what are the info. That’s the intel­lec­tu­al factor that I ought to want to say.

The ethical factor I ought to want to say to them may be very sim­ple. I ought to say: Love is smart, hatred is idiot­ish. On this world, which is get­ting increasingly shut­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we’ve to study to tol­er­ate every oth­er. We have now to study to place up with the truth that some peo­ple say issues that we don’t like. We will solely reside togeth­er in that method, and if we’re to reside togeth­er and never die togeth­er we should study a form of char­i­ty and a form of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly very important to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

No more true phrases have been spo­ken. You may watch the com­plete 1959 episode beneath.

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