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Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.

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
Dies
Many
Even
Euthanasia
Men
Unworthy
Think
Asked
Thinking
Courage
Cause
Causes

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy
Bertrand Russell
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Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.
Bertrand Russell
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War doesn't determine who's right, it determines who's left
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No opinion has ever been too errant to become a creed.
Bertrand Russell
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Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.
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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Religion is based ... mainly upon fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
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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To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
Bertrand Russell
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By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.
Bertrand Russell
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My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they're not really interested in.
Bertrand Russell
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To fear love is to fear life.
Bertrand Russell
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The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.
Bertrand Russell
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What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.
Bertrand Russell
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It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life , and that unless contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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Cruelty is, in theory, a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.
Bertrand Russell
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For some reason which I have failed to understand, many people like the system [scientific totalitarianism] when it is Russian but disliked the very same system when it was German. I am compelled to think that this is due to the power of labels these people like whatever is labelled ‘Left’ without examining whether the label has any justification.
Bertrand Russell
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Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Bertrand Russell
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Change is scientific progress is ethical change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Bertrand Russell