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Protagoras did not know if the gods exist, but he held in any case they ought to be worshiped. Philosophy, according to him, had nothing edifying to teach, and for the survival of morals we must rely upon the thoughtlessness of the majority and their willingness to believe what they had been taught.

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
Believe
Ought
Gods
Taught
According
Philosophy
Held
Teach
Survival
Edifying
Moral
Majority
Thoughtlessness
Upon
Case
Morals
Nothing
Exist
Willingness
Must
Cases
Rely

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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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I feel as if one would only discover on one's death bed what one ought to have lived for
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I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
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You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
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The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.
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We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
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No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
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My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
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One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain.
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I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
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The resistance to a new idea increases by the square of its importance.
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The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
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Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
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Broadly speaking, Protestants like to be good and have invented theology in order to keep themselves so, whereas Catholics like to be bad and have invented theology in order to keep their neighbors good. Hence, the social character of Catholicism and the individual character of Protestantism.
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If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would do it.
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Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.
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Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?
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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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I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.
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It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity.
Bertrand Russell