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The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

Bertrand Russell

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Bertrand Russell
Age: 97 †
Born: 1872
Born: May 18
Died: 1970
Died: February 2
Analytic Philosopher
Autobiographer
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Journalist
Logician
Mathematician
Metaphysician
Peace Activist
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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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More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.
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Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
Bertrand Russell
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When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.
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People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell
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We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any knowledge of truths.
Bertrand Russell
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An individual human existence should be like a river
Bertrand Russell
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The Stoic assures us that what is happening now will happen over and over again. [If so, Providende would] ultimately grow weary through despair.
Bertrand Russell
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All human activity is prompted by desire.
Bertrand Russell
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I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.
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Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless.
Bertrand Russell
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There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.
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Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
Bertrand Russell
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The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.
Bertrand Russell
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In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. ... In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.
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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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Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
Bertrand Russell
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One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.
Bertrand Russell
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The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.
Bertrand Russell
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Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.
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I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
Bertrand Russell