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Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

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
Upon
Religion
Fear
Think
Mainly
Thinking
Primarily
Atheism
Based

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else.
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To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
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Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.
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Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
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In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap.
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There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.
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I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
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Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent
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Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.
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[One] must look into hell before one has any right to speak of heaven.
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Children, after being limbs of Satan in traditional theology and mystically illuminated angels in the minds of educational reformers, have reverted to being little devils not theological demons inspired by the evil one, but scientific Freudian abominations inspired by the unconscious.
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Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
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Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.
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Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.
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Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
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A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.
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Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.
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People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable.
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On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge
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The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.
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