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.
Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.
Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes Beholds his hereditary skies.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.
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