"The more you complain the longer God lets you live"
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Quote collection
Bertrand Russell quotes (page 30 of 60)
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"The frequency with which a man experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasion which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he is accustomed"
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"Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible."
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"All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties."
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"This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the second chance were offered me."
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"Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should."
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"Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage. It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling."
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"I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness."
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"When white men first effect contact with some unspoilt race of savages, they offer them all kinds of benefits, from the light of the gospel to pumpkin pie. These, however, much as we may regret it, most savages receive with indifference. What they really value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor which enables them, for the first time in their lives, to have the illusion for a few brief moments that it is better to be alive than dead."
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"Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit."
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"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death."
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"Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time."
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"Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and sister; should they let the human race die out?"
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"I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer."
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"When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder."
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"The Mormons had a divine revelation in favour of polygamy, but under pressure from the United States Government they discovered that the revelation was not binding."
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"It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word."
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"Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth'...Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment."
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"Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach."
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"Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do."
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