Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
“The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.”
1910s, Political Ideals (1917)
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Bertrand Russell 562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970Related quotes
Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
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
Context: 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.
V.S. Pritchett
(1900–1997) British writer and critic
"Rider Haggard: Still Riding", p. 28
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)
L. Ron Hubbard
(1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology
Dianetics 55! (1954).
G. Stanley Hall
(1846–1924) American psychologist
G. Stanley Hall (1919); Cited in O'Donnell, John M. " The crisis of experimentalism in the 1920s: EG Boring and his uses of history http://www.chronicstrangers.com/history%20documents/Boring,%20Values,%20and%20History.pdf." American Psychologist 34.4 (1979). p. 290
Stanley Milgram
(1933–1984) Social psychologist
Source: Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974), p. 188
Context: Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.
