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The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves the skill of the expert consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so.

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
Brought
Advantageous
Politician
Calculating
Skills
Guessing
Really
Expert
Think
Provided
Thinking
Consists
People
Skill
Experts

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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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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Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.
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Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.
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The Church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to pride of intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma.
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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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A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime.
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Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
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Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.
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A physicist looks for causes that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes.
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Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
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I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
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Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.
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The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.
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Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of the world.
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For my part, the thing I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.
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3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is a paradox as is a paradox why the number 1 is not prime if it has no other divisors besides himself.
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Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.
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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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The essence of education is that it is a change effected in the organism to satisfy the operator.
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Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?
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