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I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

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
Men
Machines
Think
Merely
Thinking
Eternal
Life
Consciousness
Unhappily
Quite
Endowed
Wish
Machine
Makes
Miserable
Kind
Believed

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Boys and young men acquire readily the moral sentiments of their social milieu, whatever these sentiments may be.
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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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Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms no fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.
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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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War...seems a mere madness, a collective insanity.
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It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.
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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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What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.
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When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
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To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need of our civilisation.
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Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.
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Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time.
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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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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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The method of postulating what we want has many advantages they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
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Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
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The essence of education is that it is a change effected in the organism to satisfy the operator.
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Religions which have any very strong hold over men's actions have generally some instinctive basis.
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To fear love is to fear life.
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The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of which our age has to boast.
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