A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.
Interpretation
Rationality is determined by the extent to which one's intelligence guides their desires.
Bertrand Russell's quote suggests that the degree of a person's rationality is directly linked to how effectively their intelligence governs their emotional and instinctual desires. When a person's intelligence is able to analyze, understand, and control their impulses, they can make more reasoned decisions that align with rational thought rather than being led by unchecked desires.
In practice
During a discussion on decision-making ethics, one might say, 'As Bertrand Russell pointed out, a man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.'
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.
Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for youβeither by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life.
God has a prepared path for us to follow. We just have to read the omens he has left for us.
There is no losing in Jiu-Jitsu. You either win or you learn.
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