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What was exciting in the Victorian Age, would leave a man of franker epoch quite unmoved. The more prudes restrict the permissible degree of sexual appeal, the less is required to make such an appeal effective.

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
Age
Appeals
Prudes
Less
Sexual
Unmoved
Effective
Permissible
Make
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Restrict
Would
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Victorian
Men
Exciting
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Quite
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More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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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.
Bertrand Russell
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It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers.
Bertrand Russell
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Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false therefore it is false.
Bertrand Russell
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At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Bertrand Russell
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The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful.
Bertrand Russell
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A drop of water is not immortal it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal.
Bertrand Russell
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Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.
Bertrand Russell
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Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.
Bertrand Russell
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You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.
Bertrand Russell
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The first step in wisdom, as well as in morality, is to open the windows of the ego as wide as possible.
Bertrand Russell
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Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
Bertrand Russell
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Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
Bertrand Russell
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Perhaps the nuclear physicists have come so near to the ultimate secrets that He thinks it time to bring their activities to a stop. And what simpler method could He devise than to let them carry their ingenuity to the point where they exterminate the human race?
Bertrand Russell
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The true spirit of delight...is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Bertrand Russell
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Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.
Bertrand Russell
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It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know-or care-about circumstances in the colonies.
Bertrand Russell
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Your writing is never as good as you hoped but never as bad as you feared.
Bertrand Russell
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The essence of good manners consists in making it clear that one has no wish to hurt. When it is clearly necessary to hurt, it must be done in such a way as to make it evident that the necessity is felt to be regrettable.
Bertrand Russell