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In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercise their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.

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
Important
Exercise
Unlike
Enemy
Enemies
Economic
Terrorism
Since
Countries
Illegality
Secret
Private
Starve
Able
Organization
Threaten
Without
Democratic
Organizations
Country
Kill
Societies

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That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.
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What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.
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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.
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All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides this No Man's Land is philosophy.
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Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.
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It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.
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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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We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.
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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.
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Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?
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Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
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The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
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With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway about the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
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It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
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In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.
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The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.
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One of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence
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Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?
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To the young I should offer two maxims: Don't accept superficial solutions of difficult problems. It is better to do a little good than much harm. I should not offer anything more specific every young person should decide on his or her own credo.
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[Kant] was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed imjplicitly in the maximx that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.
Bertrand Russell