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)
Bertrand Russell:
582
citations
1
J'aime
Bertrand Russell citations célèbres
Histoire de mes idées philosophiques (1961)
“Une chose est ce qu’elle est, et pas autre chose.”
De l’Évèque Joseph Butler : Everything is what it is, and not another thing.
en
Autres publications
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.
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.”
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Pourquoi je ne suis pas un chrétien (1957)
Principes de reconstruction sociale (1924)
Réponse de Bertrand Russell à Ludwig Wittgenstein, en 1921, alors qu’il se trouve à Pekin.
Correspondance
Histoire de mes idées philosophiques (1961)
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)
In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
Bertrand Russell: Citations en anglais
Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 21: The Happy World, pp. 212–3
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Contexte: Man, in the long ages since he descended from the trees, has passed arduously and perilously through a vast dusty desert, surrounded by the whitening bones of those who have perished by the way, maddened by hunger and thirst, by fear of wild beasts, by dread of enemies, not only living enemies, but spectres of dead rivals projected on to the dangerous world by the intensity of his own fears. At last he has emerged from the desert into a smiling land, but in the long night he has forgotten how to smile. We cannot believe in the brightness of the morning. We think it trivial and deceptive; we cling to old myths that allow us to go on living with fear and hate – above all, hate of ourselves, miserable sinners. This is folly. Man now needs for his salvation only one thing: to open his heart to joy, and leave fear to gibber through the glimmering darkness of a forgotten past. He must lift up his eyes and say: "No, I am not a miserable sinner; I am a being who, by a long and arduous road, has discovered how to make intelligence master natural obstacles, how to live in freedom and joy, at peace with myself and therefore with all mankind." This will happen if men choose joy rather than sorrow. If not, eternal death will bury man in deserved oblivion.
On History (1904)
1900s
Contexte: 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)
Contexte: 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
Contexte: 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
“All human activity is prompted by desire.”
( wav audio file of Russell's voice http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell/desire.wav)
1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)
Contexte: 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.
Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 50
Contexte: 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.
“Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure”
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
Contexte: 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.
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
Contexte: 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)
Source: Unpopular Essays
Contexte: 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.
“The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”
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
“Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.”
Source: The Impact of Science on Society
“Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.”
Has Man a Future? (1962), p. 78
1960s
“So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”
Source: 1930s, Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 110
Contexte: 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.
Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism
“Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.”
"Don't Be Too Certain!"
1940s, Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell8.htm (1947)
Source: Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?
No known source; also attributed to Susan Sarandon.[citation needed]
Disputed
Source: 1950s, Unpopular Essays (1950)
en.wikiquote.org - Bertrand Russell / Quotes / 1950s / Unpopular Essays (1950)
1960s
Source: Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays (1961)
Contexte: 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.
Bertrand Russell
livre
The Conquest of Happiness
Variante: 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
Source: 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
