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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
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Tryleg
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Russell
Bertrand Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Bertrand Russell
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Bertrand Arthur William Russell
3rd Earl Russell
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Ants and savages put strangers to death.
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An Honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid ... because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.
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A hallucination is a fact, not an error what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
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Force plays a much larger part in the government of the world than it did before 1914, and what is especially alarming, force tends increasingly to fall into the hands of those who are enemies of civilization.
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Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.
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It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
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Beware the man of the single book
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In a just world, there would be no possibility of 'charity'.
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What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.
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It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life , and that unless contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs.
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Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.
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A generation educated in fearless freedom will have wider and bolder hopes than are possible to us
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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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Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.
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Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.
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Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.
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The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
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For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy
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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 must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves.
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