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Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster.

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
Everybody
Makes
Way
Increases
Dread
Disaster
Increase

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Mankind is divided into two classes: those who, being artificial, praise nature, and those who, being natural, praise art.
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If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure.
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My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
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Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
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It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.
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We do not like to be robbed of an enemy we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth.
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The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
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If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
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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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In considering irregular appearances, there are certain very natural mistakes which must be avoided.
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The use of force stands in need of control by a public neutral authority, in the interests of liberty no less than of justice. Within a nation, this public authority will naturally be the state in relations between nations, if the present anarchy is to cease, it will have to be some international parliament.
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It's not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts.
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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
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Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.
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A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.
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The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.
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Life is just one cup of coffee after another, and don't look for anything else.
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Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.
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Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.
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Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.
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