Full Idea
It is quite gratuitous to suppose that physical objects have colours.
Clarification
'Gratuitous' means there is no good reason for it
Gist of Idea
There is no reason to think that objects have colours
Source
Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 3)
Book Reference
Russell,Bertrand: 'The Problems of Philosophy' [OUP 1995], p.18
A Reaction
This has always seemed to me self-evident, from the day I started to study philosophy. I cannot make sense of serious attempts to defend direct (naïve) realism. Colour is a brilliant trick of natural selection for extracting environmental information.