Bertrand Russell: Frasi in inglese (pagina 15)

Bertrand Russell era filosofo, logico e matematico gallese. Frasi in inglese.
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“One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.”

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Bertrand Russell

Part I, Ch. 9: International Policy
1920s, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

“Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.”

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Bertrand Russell

Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 493
1940s

“Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak in a manner that suggests the mystique of the 'common man.' They may admit that in organic chemistry there is need of long words, and that quantum physics requires formulas that are difficult to translate into ordinary English, but philosophy (they think) is different. It is not the function of philosophy – so they maintain – to teach something that uneducated people do not know; on the contrary, its function is to teach superior persons that they are not as superior as they thought they were, and that those who are really superior can show their skill by making sense of common sense. No one wants to alter the language of common sense, any more than we wish to give up talking of the sun rising and setting. But astronomers find a different language better, and I contend that a different language is better in philosophy. Let us take an example, that of perception. There is here an admixture of philosophical and scientific questions, but this admixture is inevitable in many questions, or, if not inevitable, can only be avoided by confining ourselves to comparatively unimportant aspects of the matter in hand. Here is a series of questions and answers.
Q. When I see a table, will what I see be still there if I shut my eyes?
A. That depends upon the sense in which you use the word 'see.'
Q. What is still there when I shut my eyes?
A. This is an empirical question. Don't bother me with it, but ask the physicists.
Q. What exists when my eyes are open, but not when they are shut?
A. This again is empirical, but in deference to previous philosophers I will answer you: colored surfaces.
Q. May I infer that there are two senses of 'see'? In the first, when I 'see' a table, I 'see' something conjectural about which physics has vague notions that are probably wrong. In the second, I 'see' colored surfaces which cease to exist when I shut my eyes.
A. That is correct if you want to think clearly, but our philosophy makes clear thinking unnecessary. By oscillating between the two meanings, we avoid paradox and shock, which is more than most philosophers do.”

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Bertrand Russell

Origine: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 159

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”

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Bertrand Russell

Origine: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. VI: International relations, p. 97

“How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.”

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Bertrand Russell

A characteristic saying of Russell, reported by Aldous Huxley in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 8 October 1917, as quoted in Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 2013)
1910s

“Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?”

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Bertrand Russell

"Can a Scientific Community Be Stable?," Lecture, Royal Society of Medicine, London (29 November 1949)
1940s

“I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.”

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Bertrand Russell

Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. II: Symbolic Logic, p. 11
1900s

“Whatever we know without inference is mental.”

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Bertrand Russell

Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), p. 224
1940s

“Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs.”

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Bertrand Russell

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

“Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.”

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Bertrand Russell

1910s, Political Ideals (1917)

“All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in infering that he is an inexact man.”

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Bertrand Russell

As quoted in World Unity, Vol. IX, 3rd edition (1931), p. 190
1930s

“Love is better than hate, because it brings harmony instead of conflict into the desires of the persons concerned. Two people between whom there is love succeed or fail together, but when two people hate each other the success of either is the failure of the other.”

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Bertrand Russell

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

“Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.”

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Bertrand Russell

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

“When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.”

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Bertrand Russell

Theory of Knowledge (1913)
1910s

“The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts – the less you know the hotter you get.”

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Bertrand Russell

Attributed to Russell in Distilled Wisdom (1964) by Alfred Armand Montapert, p. 145
1960s

“When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.”

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Bertrand Russell

"Skepticism"
1940s, Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell8.htm (1947)

“I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.”

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Bertrand Russell

Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.
Youth

“Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.
Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.”

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Bertrand Russell

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)

“Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, 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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Bertrand Russell

Variante: 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.
Origine: 1910s, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), p. 33

“Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better.”

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Bertrand Russell

The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XII: The Chinese Character
1920s