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The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.

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
Matter
Laws
Wills
First
Therefore
Dynamics
Came
Notions
Law
Dogma
Free
Influenced
Firsts
Determined
Human
Seemed
Humans
Notion
Disbelieve

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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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America... where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters...
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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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All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular persons to survive.
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There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
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Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.
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Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
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Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.
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Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.
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[There has been] every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
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One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.
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Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.
Bertrand Russell
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If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?
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Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
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Upon hearing via Littlewood an exposition on the theory of relativity: To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.
Bertrand Russell
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Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning
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I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.
Bertrand Russell
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I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.
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Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.
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There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.
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