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When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.
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
Attempt
Benjamin
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England
Franklin
Support
Condemned
America
Enthusiastic
Lightning
Invented
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Impious
More quotes by Bertrand Russell
Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.
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Life is just one cup of coffee after another, and don't look for anything else.
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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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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?
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Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.
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Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens.
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With civilized men..., it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out the emotion is exactly the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat more serious.
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It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.
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When all experts agree, you need to watch out.
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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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I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
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I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
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The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.
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My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they're not really interested in.
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Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
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Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.
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The method of postulating what we want has many advantages they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
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A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.
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European travellers find the Japanese a smiling race.
Bertrand Russell
I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
Bertrand Russell