Bertrand Russell: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 20)

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.
Disputed

“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

Quelle: 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

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