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Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.

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
Humans
Customs
Cruel
Protest
Sympathy
Main
Progress
Consisted
Moral
Enlarge
Human
Attempts

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Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
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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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Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instinct can be perceived.
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To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.
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To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
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Whatever we know without inference is mental.
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Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics.
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Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
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Philosophy bakes no bread
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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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More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given
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People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable.
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I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
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Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
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I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
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The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
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The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
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There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere only triviality for a moment and then nothing.
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My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they're not really interested in.
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No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.
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