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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
George
Impious
Attempt
Benjamin
Defeat
Clergy
England
Franklin
Support
Condemned
America
Enthusiastic
Lightning
Invented

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Our beliefs are, however, often contrary to fact.
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A fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible.
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Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
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Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
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If one lived for ever the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is, they remain perennially fresh.
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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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The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.
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For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.
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Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster. Psychologically the situation is analogous to that of people trampled to death when there is a panic in a theatre caused by a cry of `Fire!'.
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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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I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language 'understand of the people.'
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America... where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters...
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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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Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.
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Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.
Bertrand Russell
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Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.
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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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God and Satan alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.
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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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Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.
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