All human activity is prompted by desire or impulse. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
Source： Bertrand Russell: What Desires Are Politically Important? 1950.
More info.：https://russell-j.com/beginner/0944WDPI-020.HTM
* a brief comment:
This passage is from the essay "What Desires Are Politically Important?", which Russell wrote and later used in his Nobel Prize lecture delivered on December 11, 1950.
A hasty reader might, upon encountering the sentence "All human activity is prompted by desire or impulse.", immediately object, thinking, "That is not true. I act out of a sense of duty." However, they would likely be convinced by Russell’s statement that "duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful."
One might argue that a masochist often acts against their own desires, but since a masochist is defined precisely as someone who desires self-inflicted suffering, this presents no contradiction at all.
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