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"The whole conception of 'sin' is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature."
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"The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive."

"And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven."

"For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good."

"Real wealth is not the weight of coins, it is the net value of your honesty."

"The burden of a porter is temporary, but the burden of a crooked politician is permanent because his conscience always carry the enormous burden of his frauds!"

"A true Christian does not judge whether a person is worthy of help, but only judges a need and how to best meet that need."
Explore more quotes by Bertrand Russell

"In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics."

"You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application."

"The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved."

"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."

"Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached."

"The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation."

"But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations."

"Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce 'proofs' of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors - Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' - but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions."
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