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The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.

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
Wisdom
Leads
Utilitarian
Knowledge
Treated
Gateway
Point
Road
Gateways
Fact
Regard
Livelihood
Science
Training
Examination
Facts
View
Mainly
Money
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Young
System
Instruction

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.
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Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.
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Patriotism which has the quality of intoxication is a danger not only to its native land but to the world, and My country never wrong is an even more dangerous maxim than My country, right or wrong.
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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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The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.
Bertrand Russell
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In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.
Bertrand Russell
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Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak in a manner that suggests the mystique of the 'common man.'
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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A priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.
Bertrand Russell
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When the journey from means to end is not too long, the means themselves are enjoyed if the end is ardently desired.
Bertrand Russell
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There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.
Bertrand Russell
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My own view on religion is . . . It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and . . . to chronicle eclipses . . . These two services I am prepared to acknowledge.
Bertrand Russell
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When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.
Bertrand Russell
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People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell
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When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
Bertrand Russell
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Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn't follow their religion would be tortured for eternity.
Bertrand Russell
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A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?
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it [is] possible to suppose that, if Russia is allowed to have peace, an amazing industrial development may take place, making Russia a rival of the United States.
Bertrand Russell
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You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
Bertrand Russell
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A million million years gives us some time to prepare for the end . . . let us make the best of it.
Bertrand Russell