"In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word."
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Quote collection
Bertrand Russell quotes (page 32 of 60)
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"An individual human existence should be like a river"
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"Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life."
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"There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship."
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"Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful."
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"Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness."
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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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"You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever. Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life."
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"The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms"
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"I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy."
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"The Axiom of Choice is necessary to select a set from an infinite number of socks, but not an infinite number of shoes."
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"You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning"
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"Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new."
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"A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists."
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"What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system."
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"If we spent half an hour every day in silent immobility, I am convinced that we should conduct all our affairs, personal, national, and international, far more sanely than we do at present."
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"There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric god. I cannot prove that either the Christian god or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration."
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"The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know-it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be."
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"All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?"
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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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