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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.

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
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Lucretius
Views
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Race
Atheist
Religion
Misery
Born
Atheism
Fear
Regard
Human
Disease

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Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.
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One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh - a process taking (say) 500 years.
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In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
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When we look at a rock what we are seeing is not the rock, but the effect of the rock upon us.
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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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Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery, and in such a world hopes could only be irrational.
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A widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.
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It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.
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One's work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days.
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Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
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What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
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Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
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Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
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I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, Good God, what have I said? and then I knew it was true.
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War...seems a mere madness, a collective insanity.
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That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.
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Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn't follow their religion would be tortured for eternity.
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It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers.
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Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.
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