Bertrand Russell Quotes
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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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It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
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When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
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Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
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Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don’t know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.
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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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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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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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Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.
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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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Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
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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 science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.
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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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The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.
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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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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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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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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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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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An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.
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Drunkenness is temporary suicide.