Bertrand Russel
Bertrand Russel
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRSwas a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense". He was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom...
against feeling intellect keeps perhaps
It is only the intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling
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To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without, being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can do for those who study it
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You must not kill your neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism
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What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
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There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action
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The professional moralist in our day is a man of less than average intelligence
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There are no better friends than those forged through honest and often heated argument.
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Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture
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Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true
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It is illegal in England to state in print that a wife can and should derive sexual pleasure from intercourse
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Mankind . . . are a mistake. The universe would be sweeter and fresher without them
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Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness
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Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.
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Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor