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Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

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
West
Comfort
Powerlessness
Among
Cynicism
Results
Frequently
Young
Highly
Women
Finds
Men
Combination
Educated

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Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
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Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter second, telling other people to do so.
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Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.
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Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.
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We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
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Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself . . . When we compare the (present) human population of the globe with . . . that of former times, we see that chemical imperialism has been . . . the main end to which human intelligence has been devoted.
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Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.
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Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
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You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.
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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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Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster. Psychologically the situation is analogous to that of people trampled to death when there is a panic in a theatre caused by a cry of `Fire!'.
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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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Cruel men believe in a cruel god and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly god, and they would be kindly in any case.
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Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation.
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If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.
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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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A fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible.
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