Bertrand Russell Quotes
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Why? Surely they can find other men.
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A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.
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The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
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No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
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Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.
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If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless.
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Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
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Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.
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I am ashamed of belonging to the species Homo Sapiens...You & I may be thankful to have lived in happier times – you more than I, because you have no children.
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The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.
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It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.
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Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
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Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
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Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
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I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty.
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Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.
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I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.
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The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite.
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There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
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Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
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Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
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An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.
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We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
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In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.