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.
Interpretation
War has often been driven by the aggression of men and the admiration they receive from women for their strength in battle.
Bertrand Russell's quote suggests that throughout history, the dynamics of war have been influenced by both male aggression and the admiration of women for masculine strength and valor. He highlights how this interplay of confidence and admiration has contributed to the facilitation of war, particularly in contexts where authority or monarchy was absent to control the circumstances.
In practice
In a debate about the motivations behind historical conflicts, this quote can highlight the role of gender dynamics.
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.
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.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that we've taken on a role or we're acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.
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