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Lord Bertrand Russell, Welsh
philosopher, logician, essayist, and renowned peace advocate
& Nobel Literature Laureate (1872-1970) co-author (with Albert
Einstein) of Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955, calling for
the curtailment of nuclear weapons
"War does not determine
who is right - only who is left."
"United with his fellow-men
by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free
man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over
every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long
march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured
by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach,
and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our
comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of
omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help
them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours
to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the
balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring
affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in
hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits
and demerits, but let us think only of their need, of the sorrows,
the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery
of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers
in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves."
("The Free Man's Worship" [1903])
" I found one day in school
a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated,
but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's
fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human
race." (Education and the Social Order [London: Allen &
Unwin, 1932])
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