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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
Men
Combination
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West
Comfort
Powerlessness
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Cynicism
Results
Frequently
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Highly
Women
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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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No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid.
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Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
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The purpose of education is to teach a defense against eloquence.
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The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
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Measures of sterilization should, in my opinion, be very definitely confined to persons who are mentally defective
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War grows out of ordinary human nature.
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Memory demands an image.
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When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to know
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In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap.
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Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.
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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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The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults from children.
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Indemnity for the past and security for the future.
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I have come to realize that an early symptom of approaching mental illness is the belief that one's work is terribly important. If you consider your work very important you should take a day off.
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God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.
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Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
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RELIGION: A set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual.
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This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate.
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Life is just one cup of coffee after another, and don't look for anything else.
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