Bertrand Russell Quotes
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Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
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What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation.
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The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
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When I was 4 years old … I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.
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To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
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Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.
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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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First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
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Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
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No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.
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The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
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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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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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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.
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Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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In art the Chinese aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable.
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The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.
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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.