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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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One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did
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The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.
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I feel as if one would only discover on one's death bed what one ought to have lived for
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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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Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.
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We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.
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Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy.
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Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent
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That which exists through itself is called The Eternal. The Eternal has neither name nor shape. It is the one essence, the one primal spirit. Essence and life cannot be seen. They are contained in the light of heaven. The light of heaven cannot be seen. It is contained in the two eyes.
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I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.
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One must care about a world one will not see.
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Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.
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Ants and savages put strangers to death.
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We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference of any knowledge of truths.
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We must be sceptical even of our scepticism.
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Religions which have any very strong hold over men's actions have generally some instinctive basis.
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Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.
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Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?
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Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.
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Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else.
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