great quote from Bertrand Russell

[democrat in Tallahassee]

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell, "Christian Ethics" from Marriage and Morals (1950), quoted from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

1. he stole that line from Yeats, more or less

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Journeyman]

2. And all good literature "borrows" from the past. . .

Bill Shakespeare, Sonnet 76:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

3. Shakespeare is a great example

of doing just that.

I should have said that I'm not giving Russell trouble.
Might have sounded that way.
It's just that Yeats' poem is such a beautiful statement, I thought it should be given credit. I think Russell would want it that way also. I'm sure he had Yeats' poem in mind when he made his statement.

[wurzel]

4. Is it possible that Yeats stole it from Russell, more or less?

Great poem tho. Is it more true today, or has it always been true?

[Fenris]

5. No. Look up their birth/death dates.

7. I don't think that answers it though

Yeats 1865- 1939
Russell 1872- 1970

I think Yeats said it first, but that's just my feeling.

6. Yeats' poem is from 1916 I think

at least it is about events in 1916 & I think he wrote it around that time.
It all depends when Russell first made his statement.
I do think they were in the same circle though, so it's completely possible that some conversation even occurred between them at some point.
some kind of cross pollination