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I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

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
Anything
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More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent
Bertrand Russell
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Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.
Bertrand Russell
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If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
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Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
Bertrand Russell
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What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.
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Some people would rather die than think.
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Zeno was concerned with three problems... These are the problem of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity.
Bertrand Russell
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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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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
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There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere only triviality for a moment and then nothing.
Bertrand Russell
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I FIND IT SO DIFFICULT NOT TO HATE, WHEN I DO NOT HATE I FEEL WE FEW ARE SO LONELY IN THE WORLD
Bertrand Russell
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Love, children, and work, are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.
Bertrand Russell
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How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.
Bertrand Russell
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One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Bertrand Russell
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Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Bertrand Russell
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Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
Bertrand Russell
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One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh - a process taking (say) 500 years.
Bertrand Russell
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God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.
Bertrand Russell
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I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
Bertrand Russell
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[Kant] was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed imjplicitly in the maximx that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.
Bertrand Russell