The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.
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Chapter I: Political IdealsBertrand Russell
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So far as it lies in a man's own power, his life will realize its best possibilities if it has three things: creative rather than possessive impulses, reverence for others, and respect for the fundamental impulse in himself.
Bertrand Russell
The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
Reinhold Niebuhr
To shut our eyes to the part that John Smith plays in the perpetuation of unworkable policies, in building up the forces of which he becomes the victim, is to perpetuate his victimization. The only means by which he can be liberated from the evil power of organized minorities is by making him aware of the nature of the impulses and motives to which the exploiters so successfully appeal. If such phenomena as nationalism, for instance, can assume forms that are gravely dangerous, it is because the nationalist appeal finds response in deep human impulses, instincts, in psychological facts which we must face.
Norman Angell
The criminal law has, from the point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those impulses of aggression which cowardice, disguised as morality, restrains in their more spontaneous forms. War has the same merit. You must not kill you neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism.
Bertrand Russell
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