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.
This is who I am: a flyspeck of human vanity in a trillion miles of stone-dead interstellar space; a graceless lump of flesh and fear in a remote desert where nearly everything that I can see or touch is designed to hurt me.
So, the world happens twice--_x000D_ once what we see it as;_x000D_ second it legends itself_x000D_ deep, the way it is.
There is a common tendency to ignore the poor or to develop some rationalisation for the good fortune of the fortunate.
Too weird to live, and too rare to die.
The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.
Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. "What inference," asked the latter, "might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?" Haldane replied: "An inordinate fondness for beetles."
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