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The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
Bertrand Russell -
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Bertrand Russell
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A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.
Bertrand Russell -
I regard religion as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
Bertrand Russell -
A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.
Bertrand Russell -
Why? Surely they can find other men.
Bertrand Russell -
Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.
Bertrand Russell -
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
Bertrand Russell
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I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty.
Bertrand Russell -
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
Bertrand Russell -
Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable. The End.
Bertrand Russell -
Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
Bertrand Russell -
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.
Bertrand Russell -
In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.
Bertrand Russell
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The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.
Bertrand Russell -
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.
Bertrand Russell -
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
Bertrand Russell -
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.
Bertrand Russell -
If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless.
Bertrand Russell -
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.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell -
The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
Bertrand Russell -
Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
Bertrand Russell -
Yes, if you happen to be interested in philosophy and good at it, but not otherwise – but so does bricklaying. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Bertrand Russell