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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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War doesn't determine who's right, it determines who's left
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You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.
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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.
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When all experts agree, you need to watch out.
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Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety.
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Always remember that true happiness is not in getting what you want, but wanting what you already have. He who dies with the most toys is still dead. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
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Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
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Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.
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The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
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Plato has dramatic strength ... but is quite unaware of the strength of the argument against his position ... and allows himself to be grossly unfair in arguing against it.
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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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To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.
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Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.
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The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.
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Broadly speaking, Protestants like to be good and have invented theology in order to keep themselves so, whereas Catholics like to be bad and have invented theology in order to keep their neighbors good. Hence, the social character of Catholicism and the individual character of Protestantism.
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This, however, is a passing nightmare in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
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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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Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
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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.
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As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.
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