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

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.
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The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.
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Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
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Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
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A hallucination is a fact, not an error what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
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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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Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
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Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
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To fear love is to fear life.
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Literature is inexhaustible, with every book a homage to infinity
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Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
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I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.
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The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
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Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
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There may be no good reasons for very many opinions that are held with passion.
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We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any knowledge of truths.
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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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Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.
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I feel as if one would only discover on one's death bed what one ought to have lived for
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Beware the man of the single book
Bertrand Russell