"Almost all education has a political motive."
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Quote collection
Bertrand Russell quotes (page 42 of 60)
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"Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States."
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"The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence."
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"When all experts agree, you need to watch out."
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"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points."
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"There are two ways of avoiding fear: one is by persuading ourselves that we are immune from disaster, and the other is by the practice of sheer courage. The latter is difficult, and to everybody becomes impossible at a certain point. The former has therefore always been more popular. Primitive magic has the purpose of securing safety, either by injuring enemies, or by protecting oneself by talismans, spells, or incantations."
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"So in everything: power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus, the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better."
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"The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake."
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"Thomas Aquinas states parenthetically, as something entirely obvious, that men are more rational than women. For my part, I see no evidence of this."
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"Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself."
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"Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work."
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"Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing."
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"Perhaps the nuclear physicists have come so near to the ultimate secrets that He thinks it time to bring their activities to a stop. And what simpler method could He devise than to let them carry their ingenuity to the point where they exterminate the human race?"
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"We ought to look the world frankly in the face."
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"It's not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts."
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"Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man."
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"We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that stochastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are the philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial state."
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"Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable."
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"The power of thought, the vast regions it can master."
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"We must be sceptical even of our scepticism."
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