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Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

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
Power
Generally
Greatest
Politics
Pleasure
Enjoy
Preventing
Next
Acquisition
Others
Enjoying
Political
Consists

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
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Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time.
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Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.
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It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.
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Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.
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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.
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When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
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Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
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If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
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The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of which our age has to boast.
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It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.
Bertrand Russell
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Meantime, the world in which we exist has other aims. But it will pass away, burnt up in the fire of its own hot passions and from its ashes will spring a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, woth the light of morning in its eyes.
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Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
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We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any knowledge of truths.
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Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.
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What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry.
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Whatever we know without inference is mental.
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When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to know
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Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
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If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?
Bertrand Russell