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Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians.

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
Science
Indians
Sense
Discovered
Must
Discovery
West
Created
Creation
Indies
Numbers
Columbus
Create
Arithmetic

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Religions which have any very strong hold over men's actions have generally some instinctive basis.
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When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
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At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
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A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.
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Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.
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The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.
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Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
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No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.
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The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts 'sins' and others 'virtue' on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.
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The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
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Televison allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone.
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To create a healthy philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician.
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Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
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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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The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.
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A drop of water is not immortal it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal.
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Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
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European travellers find the Japanese a smiling race.
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Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
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