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Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind.
Bertrand Russell -
Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.
Bertrand Russell
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All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.
Bertrand Russell -
Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.
Bertrand Russell -
Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
Bertrand Russell -
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
Bertrand Russell -
There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment and then nothing.
Bertrand Russell -
The facts of science, as they appeared to him Heraclitus, fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.
Bertrand Russell
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I do like clarity and exact thinking and I believe that very important to mankind because when you allow yourself to think inexactly your prejudices, your bias, your self interest comes in in ways you don't notice and you do bad things without knowing that you are doing them: self deception is very easy. So that I do think clear thinking immensely important.
Bertrand Russell -
I find that the whiter my hair becomes the more ready people are to believe what I say.
Bertrand Russell -
The principal source of the harm done by the State is the fact that power is its chief end.
Bertrand Russell -
The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.
Bertrand Russell -
While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
Bertrand Russell -
Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.
Bertrand Russell
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A physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes.
Bertrand Russell -
The Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.
Bertrand Russell -
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell -
Most people, at a crisis, feel more loyalty to their nation than to their class.
Bertrand Russell -
Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.
Bertrand Russell -
Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.
Bertrand Russell
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Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.
Bertrand Russell -
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
Bertrand Russell -
It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.
Bertrand Russell -
The 'social contract,' in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest.
Bertrand Russell