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An Honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid ... because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.

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
Half
Politician
Men
Unless
Nation
Tolerated
Stupid
Prejudices
Honest
Cynical
Democracy
Prejudice
Share
Honestly
Nations
Election

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.
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There is no greater reason for children to honour parents than for parents to honour children except, that while the children are young, the parents are stronger than children.
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Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.
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The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.
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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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Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
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When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to know
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A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
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Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.
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A priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.
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For love of domination we must substitute equality for love of victory we must substitute justice for brutality we must substitute intelligence for competition we must substitute cooperation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family.
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I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, Good God, what have I said? and then I knew it was true.
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Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false therefore it is false.
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Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as a means and human folly as an end.
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no one ever gossips about the virtues of others
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What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
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The Church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to pride of intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma.
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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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Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.
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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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