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

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.
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The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.
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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
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A generation educated in fearless freedom will have wider and bolder hopes than are possible to us
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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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The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults from children.
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Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.
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To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.
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All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular persons to survive.
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A marriage is likely to be called happy if neither party ever expected to get much happiness out of it.
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Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter second, telling other people to do so.
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No opinion has ever been too errant to become a creed.
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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.
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves.
Bertrand Russell
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For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.
Bertrand Russell
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A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.
Bertrand Russell
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Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell
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The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.
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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