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Progress
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Change is one thing, progress is another. Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
-Bertrand Russell
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Propaganda
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Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
-Bertrand Russell
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Questions
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In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
-Bertrand Russell
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Reading
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There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
-Bertrand Russell
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Reason
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Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one.
-Bertrand Russell
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Religion
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Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
-Bertrand Russell
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Responsibility
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One must care about a world one will not see.
-Bertrand Russell
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Rivers
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An individual human existence should be like a river
-Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old, Portraits from memory: and other essays, 1956
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An individual human existence should be like a river
-Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old, Portraits from memory: and other essays, 1956
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Science
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Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
-Bertrand Russell
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Science is what you know, philosophy what you don't know.
-Bertrand Russell
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In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.
-Bertrand Russell
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Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?
-Bertrand Russell
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Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man
-Bertrand Russell, , Religion and Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1935
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Slavery
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The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
-Bertrand Russell
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Solitude
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We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.
-Bertrand Russell
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Soul
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To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.
-Bertrand Russell
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Superstition
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Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
-Bertrand Russell
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Teaching
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An educator should think of a child as a garderner thinks of a plant, as something to be made to grow by having the right soil and the right kind amount of water. If your roses fail to bloom, it does not occur to you to whip them, but you should try to find out what has been amiss in your treatment of them... The important thing is what the children do, and not what they do not do. And what they do, if it is to have value, must be a spontaneous expression of their own vital energy.
-Bertrand Russell, Life Without Fear : New Hopes for a Changing World
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Thought
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Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
-Bertrand Russell
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Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
-Bertrand Russell
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Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.
-Bertrand Russell
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Thoughts is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.
-Bertrand Russell
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Time
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The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
-Bertrand Russell
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A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
-Bertrand Russell
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Books by and about Bertrand Russell