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Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

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
Inspire
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More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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The method of postulating what we want has many advantages they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Bertrand Russell
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If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
Bertrand Russell
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Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.
Bertrand Russell
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The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
Bertrand Russell
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What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry.
Bertrand Russell
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History is valuable, to begin with, because it is true and this, though not the whole of its value, is the foundation and condition of all the rest. That all knowledge, as such, is in some degree good, would appear to be at least probable and the knowledge of every historical fact possesses this element of goodness, even if it posses no other.
Bertrand Russell
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We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.
Bertrand Russell
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Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society.
Bertrand Russell
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We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell
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The late F. W. H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but, on being pressed, replied: Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects.
Bertrand Russell
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Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?
Bertrand Russell
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Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.
Bertrand Russell
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You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning
Bertrand Russell
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Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
Bertrand Russell
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Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.
Bertrand Russell
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Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.
Bertrand Russell