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A drop of water is not immortal it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal.

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
Quality
Skeptical
Water
Immortal
Would
Maintain
Like
Manner
Dissolution
Drop
Hydrogen
Survive
Resolved
Therefore
Inclined
Brain
Oxygen

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If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one's happiness would be increased
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Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
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If one lived for ever the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is, they remain perennially fresh.
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To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
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When all experts agree, you need to watch out.
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All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides this No Man's Land is philosophy.
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The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
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Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster.
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When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience.
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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.
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A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.
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The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults from children.
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It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.
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In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
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Change is scientific progress is ethical change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
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The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.
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[One] must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.
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The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
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One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told I have not noticed it.
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A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.
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