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The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

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
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Fools
Leader
Intelligent
Leisure
Muzzle
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Possess
Fascinate
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Excitement
Fascist
Next
Fool
Stupidity
Fascists
Hands
Emotional
Tyranny
Brutality
Firsts
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Combination
Energetic

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So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.
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Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless.
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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.
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The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.
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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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Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events.
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Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.
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Shakespeare . . . If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him [if you can].
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All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs and if these are rejected, nothing is left.
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The late F. W. H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but, on being pressed, replied: Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects.
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The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
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The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.
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Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful therefore the worse they are performed, the better.
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God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.
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One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.
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Worry is a form of fear.
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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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European travellers find the Japanese a smiling race.
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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
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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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