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I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.

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
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Think
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Thinking
Experience
Essential
Science
Essentials
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Using
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Memory
Broadest
Every
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Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
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When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England.
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Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
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It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.
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Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.
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If we compare Europe with other continents, it is marked out as [another] persecuting continent.
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Through the greatness of the universe, which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.
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Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.
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Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.
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The Eugenic Society . . . is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.
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There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere only triviality for a moment and then nothing.
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Neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point.
Bertrand Russell
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Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
Bertrand Russell
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The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.
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The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake.
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More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given
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Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
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European travellers find the Japanese a smiling race.
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No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin he does not say, 'You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.' He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right.
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Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.
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