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When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection.

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
Must
Wicked
Uncomfortable
Began
Committed
Introspection
Sin
Respectable
Wonder
Regarded
Found
Engage
Thought
Sins

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
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Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
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Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.
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Freedom in education has many aspects. There is first of all freedom to learn or not to learn. Then there is freedom as to what to learn. And in later education there is freedom of opinion.
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The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
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The evolution of our spirit is blazed on the dark background of eternity by our individual wakes. Every person can, if he/she wishes, leave a more or less brilliant wake behind them.
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Why repeat the old errors, if there are so many new errors to commit?
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Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
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It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.
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You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
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All the conditions of happiness are realized in the life of the man of science.
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My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.
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Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.
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The tendency of our perceptions is to emphasise increasingly the objective elements in an impression, unless we have some special reason, as artists have, for doing the opposite.
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Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale
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All religions are both harmful and untrue.
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The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
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A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.
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You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.
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I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
Bertrand Russell