Bertrand Russell Quotes
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I regard religion as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
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To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.
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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.
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There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
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I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.
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Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.
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Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
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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.
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There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
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To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
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The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
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Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
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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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When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.
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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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Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.
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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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Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.