Russell, when asked to give an example of how any statement whatever, say that Russell (a renowned atheist) is the Pope, might follow from the self-contradictory statement 5=2+2, suggested that 3 be subtracted from both sides of this supposed equality; it follows that 2=1, thus two different persons, viz. Bertrand Russell and the Pope, form one person; hence Russell is the Pope.
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Witold Marciszewski, in Logic from a Rhetorical Point of View (1994), p. 109Bertrand Russell
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Britain for a long time had a reflection of its class structure which meant that people like, well, J. B. S. Haldane who was the nephew of Lord Haldane, or Bertrand Russell who became Lord Russell, could do what they pleased, and it's interesting to think that Bertrand Russell never had a job, he never had to compete for a job. Haldane had four or five different jobs in his life, totally different. He probably could have — if he had been bothered — have just abandoned his job and went on to live otherwise. ... But this no longer exists. IBM no longer exists. I don't see a place now where somebody like myself who combined, let's say, unusual gifts and unusual tastes and, who everybody said has promise, was certainly a misfit of the worst kind could find a position at this point and I think that a tragedy.
Benoit Mandelbrot
My husband, T. S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in the driver said: 'You're T. S. Eliot.' When asked how he knew, he replied: 'Ah, I've got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, "Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about," and, do you know, he couldn't tell me.'
Bertrand Russell
Russell's is undeniably one of the great minds of our time. It has always been impelled by a passionate and relentless curiosity and a hatred of cruelty and injustice. An aristocratic gadfly, he has never for any reason hesitated to speak out on any issue that engaged him.
Although born in the Victorian era... he seems more like an 18th Century figure from the Age of Reason like Voltaire, whom he strikingly resembles both in physiognomy and spirit. Philosophy is an abstruse subject, which Russell once defined as an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously; the fame of philosophers seldom spreads beyond the confines of university campuses. But Russell's has, because for the last 40 years he has striven to think about complex current issues — politics, history, ethics, economics — and to convey his thoughts to those who longed for insight in language they could understand. And whatever Bertrand Russell has done, wherever he has gone there has usually been laughter.Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell never wavered in acknowledging his intellectual debt to Giuseppe Peano. In many ways the contribution that Russell made to the foundations of mathematics, culminating in Principia Mathematica, strongly bears Peano's mark.
Giuseppe Peano
Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings.
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