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If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
Bertrand Russell -
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
Bertrand Russell
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Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
Bertrand Russell -
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell -
We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach.
Bertrand Russell -
I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet – a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things...
Bertrand Russell -
It is obvious that 'obscenity' is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means 'anything that shocks the magistrate.'
Bertrand Russell -
The state is primarily an organization for killing foreigners.
Bertrand Russell
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There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.
Bertrand Russell -
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Bertrand Russell -
Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.
Bertrand Russell -
The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.
Bertrand Russell -
When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection.
Bertrand Russell -
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
Bertrand Russell
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One must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.
Bertrand Russell -
When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.
Bertrand Russell -
When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
Bertrand Russell -
The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call 'particulars' – such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things – and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.
Bertrand Russell -
To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell -
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
Bertrand Russell
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Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
Bertrand Russell -
Choose your parents wisely.
Bertrand Russell -
All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in infering that he is an inexact man.
Bertrand Russell -
This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind.
Bertrand Russell