Bertrand Russell citations (582 citations, Page 13)

Bertrand Russell: 582 citations1 J'aime

Bertrand Russell citations célèbres

“Nous pouvons détruire les animaux plus facilement qu’ils ne peuvent nous détruire : c’est la seule base solide de notre prétention de supériorité. Nous valorisons l’art, la science et la littérature, parce que ce sont des choses dans lesquelles nous excellons. Mais les baleines pourraient valoriser le fait de souffler et les ânes pourraient considérer qu’un bon braiement est plus exquis que la musique de Bach. Nous ne pouvons prouver qu'ils ont tort, sauf par l’exercice de notre pouvoir arbitraire. Tous les systèmes éthiques, en dernière analyse, dépendent des armes de guerre.”

Bertrand Russell

We can destroy animals more easily than they can destroy us; that is the only solid basis of our claim to superiority. We value art and science and literature, because these are things in which we excel. But whales might value spouting, and donkey might maintain that a good bray is more exquisite than the music of Bach. We cannot prove them wrong except by the exercise of arbitrary power. All ethical systems, in the last analysis, depend upon weapons of war.
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Supériorité de l'espèce humaine basée sur le pouvoir arbitraire (1931-33)

“J'ai trouvé, pour prendre un exemple important, que par l'analyse de la physique et de la perception, on peut entièrement résoudre le problème du rapport de l'esprit et de la matière. Il est vrai que personne n'a accepté ce qui me paraît la solution, mais je crois et j'espère que c'est seulement parce que l'on n'a pas compris ma théorie.”

Bertrand Russell

Histoire de mes idées philosophiques (1961)

“Une chose est ce qu’elle est, et pas autre chose.”

Bertrand Russell

De l’Évèque Joseph Butler : Everything is what it is, and not another thing.
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“Le Tractacus logico-philosophicus de M. Wittgenstein, qu’il se révèle ou non comme donnant la vérité définitive sur les sujets dont il traite, mérite certainement, par son ampleur et sa portée et sa profondeur, d’être considéré comme événement important dans le monde philosophique.”

Bertrand Russell

Autres publications

“Trois passions, simples et extrêmement fortes, ont gouverné ma vie : la recherche passionnée de l’amour, la quête du savoir et une douloureuse pitié devant la souffrance de l’humanité.”

Bertrand Russell

extrait de autobiographie <br class="br">Principes de reconstruction sociale (1924) <br class="br">Source: Principes de reconstruction social http://books.google.fr/books?id=V2sUmFK3LqwC&pg=PA1, Bertrand Russell, revue et corrigé par Normand Baillargeon , introduction.

“Quand la guerre fut finie, je vis que tout ce que j’avais fait avait été complètement inutile[…]. Je n'avais pas sauvé une seule vie ou raccourci la guerre d'une seule minute. Je n’avais pas été capable de quoi que ce soit pour diminuer la profonde amertume qui donnerait le Traité de Versailles.”

Bertrand Russell

Principes de reconstruction sociale (1924)

Bertrand Russell Citations

“Si nous n'avions pas peur de la mort, je ne crois pas que serait jamais née l'idée d'immortalité.”

Bertrand Russell

Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“J'estime que dans toutes les définitions de la vie bienheureuse, il faut faire entrer un instinct d'animal, sans quoi la vie devient fade et sans intérêt”

Bertrand Russell

Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“Le propre de la philosophie est de commencer par quelque chose de si simple qu'il ne semble pas la peine de l'énoncer, et de terminer par quelque chose de si paradoxal que personne n'y croira.”

Bertrand Russell

La philosophie de l'atomisme logique (1918)

“L'homme est la résultante de causes qui n'avaient pas prévu les effets qui en découleraient : son origine, son développement, ses espoirs et ses craintes, ses émotions et ses convictions ne sont que le produit d'associations d'atomes accidentelles… Aucun feu, aucun héroïsme, aucune pensée ni aucun sentiment aussi intenses soient-ils, ne peuvent préserver une vie au-delà de la tombe… Tout le labeur effectué au cours des âges, toute la ferveur, toute l'inspiration, toute l'éclatante expression du génie humain, sont voués à disparaître dans l'extinction générale de notre système solaire, et tout l'édifice des réalisations humaines sera inévitablement enfoui sous les décombres d'un univers en ruines.”

Bertrand Russell

Pourquoi je ne suis pas un chrétien (1957)

“…Cet écrit circonstanciel, tout empreint de passion et de sérieux, est aussi un des écrits (certains assureraient même : l’écrit) politiques majeurs de Russell. Richard A. Rempel rappelle ainsi, avec raison, que cet ouvrage est généralement reconnu, « tant par les spécialistes que par le publique en général, comme la plus importante contribution de Russell à la philosophie politique.»”

Bertrand Russell

Principes de reconstruction sociale (1924)

“A onze ans, j'ai commencé la”

Bertrand Russell

“Mes étudiants sont des bolcheviques, parce que c’est la mode. Ils ne comprennent pas que je sois pas davantage bolchevique moi-même. Il n'ont pas le niveau pour faire de la logique mathématique. Je leur enseigne la psychologie, la philosophie, la politique et Einstein. De temps à autre je les invite à une soirée chez moi et ils font partir des feux d’artifices dans la cour. Il préfèrent cela à mes cours.”

Bertrand Russell

Réponse de Bertrand Russell à Ludwig Wittgenstein, en 1921, alors qu’il se trouve à Pekin.
Correspondance

“Bertrand Russell est un philosophe sans philosophie. On pourrait dire la même chose en disant qu’il est un philosophe de toutes les philosophies. Il n’est guère de point de vue philosophique important aujourd’hui que l’on ne trouve reflété dans ses écrits à une période ou une autre.”

Bertrand Russell

“Le socialisme, quoi que nous pensions de ses mérites, est un grand pouvoir, qui se développe et transforme la vie économique et politique; et le socialisme doit son nom à un petit nombre de théoriciens isolés.”

Bertrand Russell

Principes de reconstruction sociale (1924)

“La science n'a jamais tout à fait raison, mais elle a rarement tout à fait tort, et, en général, elle a plus de chance d'avoir raison que les théories non scientifiques. Il est donc rationnel de l'accepter à titre d'hypothèse.”

Bertrand Russell

Histoire de mes idées philosophiques (1961)

“Tout problème philosophique, soumis à une analyse et une élucidation indispensables, se trouve ou bien n'être pas philosophique du tout ou bien logique, dans le sens où nous employons ce terme.”

Bertrand Russell

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.
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La méthode scientifique en philosophie (1914)

“Mais il demeurera toujours fidèle au principe de parcimonie qui, comme il le dit lui-même, caractérise sa « renonciation progressive à Pythagore ». Une formulation particulière de ce principe consiste à dire que « la logique mathématique a pour but, non de donner aux mots un statut ontologique qui pourrait être mis en doute, mais plutôt de diminuer le nombre de mots dont la signification directe est de désigner un objet ». Voilà bien le principe paradigmatique que Russell lègue à la philosophie toute entière : lorsque le sage montre la lune, il est prudent au préalable de jouer à l’imbécile en examinant le doigt.”

Bertrand Russell

“Prenez garde que personne ne fasse de vous sa proie par la philosophie.”

Bertrand Russell

“De façon générale, on estime que gagner de l'argent, c'est bien, mais que le dépenser, c'est mal. Quelle absurdité, si l'on songe qu'il y a toujours deux parties dans une transaction: autant soutenir que les clés, c'est bien, mais les trous de serrures, non.”

Bertrand Russell livre Éloge de l'oisiveté

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

Bertrand Russell: Citations en anglais

“In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1940s, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Chapter XXXI "The Philosophy of Logical Analysis"

“I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet – a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things…”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), p. 261

“For example, a man who had seen a great many white swans might argue, by our principle, that on the data it was probable that all swans were white, and this might be a perfectly sound argument. The argument is not disproved by the fact that some swans are black, because a thing may very well happen in spite of the fact that some data render it improbable. In the case of the swans, a man might know that colour is a very variable characteristic in many species of animals, and that, therefore, an induction as to colour is peculiarly liable to error. But this knowledge would be a fresh datum, by no means proving that the probability relatively to our previous data had been wrongly estimated. The fact, therefore, that things often fail to fulfill our expectations is no evidence that our expectations will not probably be fulfilled in a given case or a given class of cases. Thus our inductive principle is at any rate not capable of being disproved by an appeal to experience. The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience.”

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Bertrand Russell

"On Induction"
1910s, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

“Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult, it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.”

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Bertrand Russell

On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 36.No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
1920s

“I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism - both untrue and harmful. It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they disagree, not more than one of them can be true. With very few exception, the religions which a man accepts is that of the community in which he lives, which makes it obvious that the influence of environment is what has led him to accept the religion in question.”

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Bertrand Russell

Preface (1957)
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

“I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.”

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Bertrand Russell

Letter to Gilbert Murray, March 21, 1903
1900s

“The power of the State may be brought to bear, as it often is in England, through public opinion rather than through the laws. By oratory and the influence of the Press, public opinion is largely created by the State, and a tyrannous public opinion is as great an enemy to liberty as tyrannous laws. If the young man who will not fight finds that he is dismissed from his employment, insulted in the streets, cold-shouldered by his friends, and thrown over with scorn by any woman who may formerly have liked him, he will feel the penalty quite as hard to bear as a death sentence. A free community requires not only legal freedom, but a tolerant public opinion, an absence of that instinctive inquisition into our neighbors' affairs which, under the guise of upholding a high moral standard, enables good people to indulge unconsciously a disposition to cruelty and persecution. Thinking ill of others is not in itself a good reason for thinking well of ourselves. But so long as this is not recognized, and so long as the State can manufacture public opinion, except in the rare cases where it is revolutionary, public opinion must be reckoned as a definite part of the power of the State.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Why Men Fight https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Men_Fight (1917), pp. 48-50

“Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things.”

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Bertrand Russell

1950s, The Impact of Science on Society (1952)

“New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.”

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Bertrand Russell livre Religion and Science

Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
1930s

“Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 6: On the Scientific Method in Philosophy

“A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.”

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Bertrand Russell

"On Denoting", Mind, Vol. 14, No. 56 (October 1905), pp. 479–493; as reprinted in Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1950, (1956)
1900s

“While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”

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Bertrand Russell livre Religion and Science

Religion and Science (1935), Ch. IX: Science of Ethics.
1930s
Variante: "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know." (Attributed to Russell in Ted Peters' Cosmos As Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance [1989], p. 14, with a note that it was "told [to] a BBC audience [earlier this century]").

“When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection.”

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Bertrand Russell

Interview with Irwin Ross, September 1957;If there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence. Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (2005), p. 385
1950s

“I find that the whiter my hair becomes the more ready people are to believe what I say.”

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Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1960), p. 80
1960s

“When I say that children should be told about sex, I do not mean that they should be told only the bare physiological facts; they should be told whatever they wish to know. There should be no attempt to represent adults as more virtuous than they are, or sex as occurring only in marriage. There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them, and feel justified in lying to them.”

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Bertrand Russell

Our Sexual Ethics http://www.utilitarian.org/texts/oursexethics.html (1936) <br class="br">1930s

“Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a captain who appears to possess the courage and sagacity necessary for the achievement of supremacy. Even in religion this impulse appears. Nietzsche accused Christianity of inculcating a slave-morality, but ultimate triumph was always the goal. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 2: Leaders and Followers

“I was a solitary, shy, priggish youth. I had no experience of the social pleasures of boyhood and did not miss them. But I liked mathematics, and mathematics was suspect because it has no ethical content. I came also to disagree with the theological opinions of my family, and as I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, of which they profoundly disapproved. Every time the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, 'What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.”

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Bertrand Russell

After some fifty or sixty repetitions, this remark ceased to amuse me.
Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 9

“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.”

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Bertrand Russell

1900s, A Free Man's Worship (1903)

“Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.”

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Bertrand Russell

The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine (6 March 1938)
1930s

“Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form “p implies q,” where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants. And logical constants are all notions definable in terms of the following: Implication, the relation of a term to a class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, and such further notions as may be involved in the general notion of propositions of the above form. In addition to these, mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the propositions which it considers, namely the notion of truth.”

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Bertrand Russell

Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, p. 3
1900s

“I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race – I am ashamed to belong to such a species.”

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Bertrand Russell

Letter to Colette, December 28, 1916
1910s

“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 2: Dreams and Facts

“Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 1: The Impulse to Power

“A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.”

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Bertrand Russell

The Scientific Outlook (1931)
1930s

“I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), p. 200

“We are thus led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by " soft " data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), p. 70

“The old often envy the young; when they do, they are apt to treat them cruelly.”

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Bertrand Russell

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

“I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. VI: International relations, p. 99

“There is a connected set of events (light-waves) travelling outward from a centre… there are some respects in which all events are alike, and others in which they differ… We must not think of a light-wave as a 'thing', but as a connected group of rhythmical events. The mathematical characteristics of such a group can be inferred by physics, but the intrinsic character of the component events cannot be inferred.”

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Bertrand Russell

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”

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Bertrand Russell

This has often been published as a quotation of Russell, when an author is given (e.g. in Quote Unquote – A HandBook of Quotation, 2005, p. 291), but without any sourced citations, and seems to have circulated as an anonymous proverb as early as 1932.
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