"If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important."
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Bertrand Russell quotes (page 18 of 60)
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"Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored."
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"The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice."
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"It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition."
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"Science, by itself cannot, supply us with an ethic."
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"The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear."
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"The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest."
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"Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile."
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"Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations."
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"I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in."
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"The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know."
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"Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man."
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"What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices."
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"What is matter? Never mind."
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"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards."
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"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell."
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"Nothing of importance is ever achieved without discipline. I feel myself sometimes not wholly in sympathy with some modern educational theorists, because I think that they underestimate the part that discipline plays. But the discipline you have in your life should be one determined by your own desires and your own needs, not put upon you by society or authority."
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"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery."
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"No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?"
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"Love is a slippery eel that bites like hell"
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