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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.

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
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Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic.
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Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
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If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
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Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.
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There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings remember your humanity, and forget the rest.
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It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.
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What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?
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It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.
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A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?
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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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Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
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Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents
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The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.
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Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events.
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Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.
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Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.
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Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.
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Even if we could be certain that one of the world's religions were perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability.
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Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do.
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Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.
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