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When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

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
Men
Inferring
Inexact
Exact
Tells
Safe
Truth
Anything

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
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Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.
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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.
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A hallucination is a fact, not an error what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
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You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.
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Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.
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If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
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With civilized men..., it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out the emotion is exactly the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat more serious.
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If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
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I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
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Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked.
Bertrand Russell
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I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of that joy. ... I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
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Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety.
Bertrand Russell
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If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?
Bertrand Russell
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To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell
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I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
Bertrand Russell
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Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery, and in such a world hopes could only be irrational.
Bertrand Russell
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Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.
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Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.
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Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.
Bertrand Russell