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"Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences."
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"Christianity is not an accretion, it is not something added. It is a new total outlook which is satisfied with nothing less than penetration to the furthest corners of the mind and the understanding."

"By the 1960s the United States had a new ruling class-the teenager!"

"A great problem in America is that we have an anemic and watered-down Christianity that has produced an anemic, watered-down, and spineless Christian who is not willing to stand up and be counted on every issue."

"The whole world ought to know the story of the Bible."

"Old age is Satan's last chance to blow us off course."

"The central theme of the Bible is salvation, and the central personality of the Bible is Christ."

"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act."

"I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class"

"You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world."

"In the equation of life, the limit does not exist."
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."

"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."

"I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and now."

"The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them."
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