Bertrand Russell Quotes
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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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If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.
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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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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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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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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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Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.
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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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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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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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Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
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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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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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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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Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.
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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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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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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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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 observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
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An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.