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There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

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Bertrand Russell
Age: 97 †
Born: 1872
Born: May 18
Died: 1970
Died: February 2
Analytic Philosopher
Autobiographer
Epistemologist
Essayist
Journalist
Logician
Mathematician
Metaphysician
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Tryleg
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Russell
Bertrand Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Bertrand Russell
Earl Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Gained
Useless
Pleasure
Knowledge
Much
Uselessness

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.
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What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?
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it [is] possible to suppose that, if Russia is allowed to have peace, an amazing industrial development may take place, making Russia a rival of the United States.
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A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.
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If we compare Europe with other continents, it is marked out as [another] persecuting continent.
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Some `advanced thinkers' are of the opinion that anyone who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion if it were not, truth would be easier to come by than it is.
Bertrand Russell
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There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.
Bertrand Russell
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Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false therefore it is false.
Bertrand Russell
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The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.
Bertrand Russell
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Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
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To create a healthy philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician.
Bertrand Russell
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America... where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters...
Bertrand Russell
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The essence of education is that it is a change effected in the organism to satisfy the operator.
Bertrand Russell
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What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
Bertrand Russell
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There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.
Bertrand Russell
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Love cannot exists as a duty to tell a child that it ought to love its parents and its brother and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse.
Bertrand Russell
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Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.
Bertrand Russell
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Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
Bertrand Russell
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To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
Bertrand Russell
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The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.
Bertrand Russell