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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.

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
Everything
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Without
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Idea
Dues
Must
Cannot
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Really
Anything
Beginning
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May
Poverty
World
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Imagination

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.
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The Eugenic Society . . . is perpetually bewailing the fact that wage-earners breed faster than middle-class people.
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All religions are both harmful and untrue.
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Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and sister should they let the human race die out?
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Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
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Neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point.
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In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
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The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
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Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.
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Your writing is never as good as you hoped but never as bad as you feared.
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
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The key to happiness is accepting one unpleasant reality every day.
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A life which goes excessively against natural impulse is... likely to involve effects of strain that may be quite as bad as indulgence in forbidden impulses would have been. People who live a life which is unnatural beyond a point are likely to be filled with envy, malice and uncharitableness.
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Why repeat the old errors, if there are so many new errors to commit?
Bertrand Russell
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If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.
Bertrand Russell
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When all experts agree, you need to watch out.
Bertrand Russell
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Measures of sterilization should, in my opinion, be very definitely confined to persons who are mentally defective
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All's well that ends well which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.
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The question of unrealityis a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.
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One's work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days.
Bertrand Russell