Bertrand Russell citations (582 citations, Page 14)

Bertrand Russell: 582 citations 1 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.
en
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.
en

“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
Principes de reconstruction sociale (1924)
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)

personnes

“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)

univers , pensée , vie , hommes

“…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)

passion

“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

mode , temps , mathématiques

“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

guerre

“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)

vie

“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)

science , chance

“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.
en
La méthode scientifique en philosophie (1914)

problème , Sens

“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

mathématiques

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

Bertrand Russell

personnes

“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

“Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

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Bertrand Russell

1910s, Political Ideals (1917)

“Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”

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Bertrand Russell

1910s, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

“Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.”

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Bertrand Russell

Quoted in The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal, Vol. 209 (1909), p. 387
1900s

“It is not to be supposed that young men and women who are busy acquiring valuable specialized knowledge can spare a great deal of time for the study of philosophy, but even in the time that can easily be spared without injury to the learning of technical skills, philosophy can give certain things that will greatly increase the student’s value as a human being and as a citizen. It can give a habit of exact and careful thought, not only in mathematics and science, but in questions of large practical import. It can give an impersonal breadth and scope to the conception of the ends of life. It can give to the individual a just measure of himself in relation to society, of man in the present to man in the past and in the future, and of the whole history of man in relation to the astronomical cosmos. By enlarging the objects of his thoughts it supplies an antidote to the anxieties and anguish of the present, and makes possible the nearest approach to serenity that is available to a sensitive mind in our tortured and uncertain world.”

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Bertrand Russell

1940s, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)

“In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.”

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Bertrand Russell

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

“I must confess that I am deeply troubled. I fear that human beings are intent upon acting out a vast deathwish and that it lies with us now to make every effort to promote resistance to the insanity and brutality of policies which encompass the extermination of hundreds of millions of human beings.”

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Bertrand Russell

Letter to Rudolf Carnap, June 21, 1962
1960s

“Most people, at a crisis, feel more loyalty to their nation than to their class.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1930s, Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Ch. 8: Economic Power

“I must confess that I am unable to appreciate the merits of Confucius. His writings are largely occupied with trivial points of etiquette, and his main concern is to teach people how to behave correctly on various occasions. When one compares him, however, with the traditional religious teachers of some other ages and races, one must admit that he has great merits, even if they are mainly negative. His system, as developed by his followers, is one of pure ethics, without religious dogma; it has not given rise to a powerful priesthood, and it has not led to persecution. It certainly has succeeded in producing a whole nation possessed of exquisite manners and perfect courtesy. Nor is Chinese courtesy merely conventional; it is quite as reliable in situations for which no precedent has been provided. And it is not confined to one class; it exists even in the humblest coolie. It is humiliating to watch the brutal insolence of white men received by the Chinese with a quiet dignity which cannot demean itself to answer rudeness with rudeness. Europeans often regard this as weakness, but it is really strength, the strength by which the Chinese have hitherto conquered all their conquerors.”

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Bertrand Russell

The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XI: Chinese and Western Civilization Contrasted
1920s

“When I was 4 years old … I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.”

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Bertrand Russell

BBC interview on "Face to Face" (1959); The Listener, Vol. 61 (1959), p. 503
1950s

“The Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians

“When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.”

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Bertrand Russell

Foreword to Ernest Gellner Words and Things (1959)
1950s

“If a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.”

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Bertrand Russell

John D. Barrow, Between Inner and Outer Space: Essays on Science, Art and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-192-88041-1, Part 4, ch. 13: Why is the Universe Mathematical? (p. 88). Also found in Barrow's "The Mathematical Universe" http://www.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/mathematical_universe.htm (1989) and The Artful Universe Expanded (Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-192-80569-X, ch. 5, Player Piano: Hearing by Numbers, p. 250
Misattributed

“Not enough evidence God! Not enough evidence!”

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Bertrand Russell livre Religion and Science

As quoted in Wesley C. Salmon's "Religion and Science: A New Look at Hume's Dialogues," Philosophical Studies 33 (1978), p. 176.
Also in the New York Times article So God's Really in the Details? (May 11, 2002) by Emily Eakin: "Asked what he would say if God appeared to him after his death and demanded to know why he had failed to believe, the British philosopher and staunch evidentialist Bertrand Russell replied that he would say, 'Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence.'
The original source of this quote is an article by Leo Rosten published in Saturday Review/World (February 23, 1974) which features an interview with Bertrand Russell. There, Rosten writes http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1974feb23-00025: "Confronted with the Almighty, [Russell] would ask, 'Sir, why did you not give me better evidence?'"
Disputed

“It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.”

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Bertrand Russell

Letter to Rachel Gleason Brooks, May 5, 1930
1930s

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

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Bertrand Russell

From Marthe Troly-Curtin's Phrynette Married (1912). Misattributed to Bertrand Russell due to an ambiguous entry in Laurence J. Peter's Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977) http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/11/time-you-enjoy/
Misattributed

“It is generally admitted that most grown-up people, however regrettably, will try to have a good time.”

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Bertrand Russell

1930s, Mortals and Others (1931-35)

“That I, a funny little gesticulating animal on two legs, should stand beneath the stars and declaim in a passion about my rights – it seems so laughable, so out of all proportion. Much better, like Archimedes, to be killed because of absorption in eternal things…
There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the "intellectual love of God." Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.”

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Bertrand Russell

Letter to Miss Rinder, July 30, 1918
1910s

“You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever.
Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.”

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Bertrand Russell

Leaflet issued while Russell was in Brixton Prison, 1961
1960s

“The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.”

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Bertrand Russell

1910s, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)

“The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call "particulars" – such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things – and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.”

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Bertrand Russell

1910s, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)

“Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.”

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Bertrand Russell

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic