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To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood.

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
Everything
Hostile
Mind
Shown
World
Primitive
Conception
Friendly
Understood
Friendliness
Either
Conceptions
Experience
Hostility

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Cruelty is, in theory, a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.
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My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
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Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
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... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
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In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercise their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.
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William James used to preach the will-to-believe. For my part, I should wish to preach the will-to-doubt. None of our beliefs are quite true all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
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One's work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days.
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Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.
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I went to Salt Lake City and the Mormons tried to convert me, but when I found they forbade tea and tobacco I thought it was no religion for me.
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Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster.
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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.
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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.
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Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
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Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.
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Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
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There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.
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One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his or her work important.
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Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents
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All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs and if these are rejected, nothing is left.
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If we compare Europe with other continents, it is marked out as [another] persecuting continent.
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