Bertrand Russell citáty

strana 4

Varianta: Většina lidí raději umírá než myslí. A přinejmenším jednou v životě to učiní.

Varianta: Jsou-li všichni odborníci za jedno, je na místě opatrnost.

Zdroj: UDWIG, Petr. Konec prokrastinace. V Brně: Jan Melvil, 2013. (Briquet).
http://ndk.cz/view/uuid:c1912080-9702-11e4-a808-005056827e52?page=uuid:d7b6c660-9a92-11e4-a2db-005056825209 Dostupné online. ISBN 978-80-87270-51-6. S. 272.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Zdroj: Cit. u Barrow, Pí na nebesích.

k vládě Spojených států amerických

On History (1904)
1900s
Kontext: It is true that numerous instances are not always necessary to establish a law, provided the essential and relevant circumstances can easily be disentangled. But, in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible. Where our main endeavour is to discover general laws, we regard these as intrinsically more valuable than any of the facts which they inter-connect. In astronomy, the law of gravitation is plainly better worth knowing than the position of a particular planet on a particular night, or even on every night throughout a year. There are in the law a splendour and simplicity and sense of mastery which illuminate a mass of otherwise uninteresting details... But in history the matter is far otherwise... Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.

1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918)
Kontext: The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know—it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

"Is There a God?" (1952)
1950s
Kontext: When I come to my own beliefs, I find myself quite unable to discern any purpose in the universe, and still more unable to wish to discern one.

W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook (1949), entry for 1901
Sometimes misquoted as "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
Sometimes misattributed to Anatole France
Note that Russell does say something similar in Marriage and Morals (1929): "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."
Misattributed

( wav audio file of Russell's voice http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/desire.wav)
1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
Kontext: All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

Zdroj: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 50
Kontext: My first advice (on how not to grow old) would be to choose you ancestors carefully. Although both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my other ancestors. My maternal grandfather, it is true, was cut off in the flower of his youth, at the age of sixty-seven, but my other three grandparents all lived to be over eighty. Of remoter ancestors I can only discover one who did not live to a great age, and he died of a disease which is now rare, namely, having his head cut off.

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: Contemplation and Action, 1902-1914, ed. Richard A. Rempel, Andrew Brink and Margaret Moran (Routledge, 1993, : Textual Notes, p. 555; also in Laurence J. Peter Quotations for our time (1978), p. 188
Attributed from posthumous publications
Kontext: Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure: a larger heart, and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain.

Zdroj: A History of Western Philosophy

Principles of Social Reconstruction [Originally titled Why Men Fight : A Method Of Abolishing The International Duel], Ch. VIII : What We Can Do, p. 257
1910s
Kontext: It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly. The State and Property are the great embodiments of possessiveness; it is for this reason that they are against life, and that they issue in war. Possession means taking or keeping some good thing which another is prevented from enjoying; creation means putting into the world a good thing which otherwise no one would be able to enjoy. Since the material goods of the world must be divided among the population, and since some men are by nature brigands, there must be defensive possession, which will be regulated, in a good community, by some principle of impersonal justice. But all this is only the preface to a good life or good political institutions, in which creation will altogether outweigh possession, and distributive justice will exist as an uninteresting matter of course.
The supreme principle, both in politics and in private life, should be to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that center round possession.

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
Zdroj: Unpopular Essays
Kontext: It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds.

Said in conversation with Mrs. Alan Wood; quoted in Alan Wood's Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic (Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 236-7
1950s

Zdroj: Marriage and Morals

Zdroj: The Impact of Science on Society

Has Man a Future? (1962), p. 78
1960s

Zdroj: 1930s, Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 110
Kontext: Owing to the identification of religion with virtue, together with the fact that the most religious men are not the most intelligent, a religious education gives courage to the stupid to resist the authority of educated men, as has happened, for example, where the teaching of evolution has been made illegal. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.

Zdroj: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism

"Don't Be Too Certain!"
1940s, Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell8.htm (1947)
Zdroj: Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?

As quoted in Think, Vol. 27 (1961), p. 32
Disputed

No known source; also attributed to Susan Sarandon.[citation needed]
Disputed

Zdroj: What I Believe

Zdroj: 1950s, Unpopular Essays (1950)

en.wikiquote.org - Bertrand Russell / Quotes / 1950s / Unpopular Essays (1950)

1960s
Zdroj: Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays (1961)
Kontext: The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

Varianta: The secret of happiness is very simply this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile
Zdroj: 1930s, The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

When asked "Does philosophy contribute to happiness?" (SHM 76), as quoted in The quotable Bertrand Russell (1993), p. 149
Attributed from posthumous publications